PC Does Not Boot from Converted VHD Disk (windows 7)
Hi,
After many many days of testing and banging my head on my desk i finally figured out how the VHD works and the reason it fails using the latest build of "Acronis True Image Home 2010 Build # 6053".
I'm not sure if this is a bug or by design but i did not find any topic on the behaviour neither on this forum or google but maybe there is and i just missed it.
Any way i wanted to write about my experience so that others save allot of time and perhaps if Acronis is not aware of this problem they can fix it in future releases.
Basically i tested the VHD feature for a month ago and it just worked for me.
what i did was:
1) I made a .tib backup
2) converted my .tib to .VHD
3) Using "Acronis Boot Sequence Manager" i choose my created .VHD
4) rebooted and choose the VHD during boot-up
5) Windows 7 starts using the VHD
Well so far all was excellent and it worked like a charm until i changed my hard-drives and this time
i used Windows7's own partition software and deleted my partitions and remade them with different size.
This time around i followed all the steps above but every time i ended up in the real windows7 environment with the VHD "Only" mounted.
At first i thought it was because my second drive was also "primal" since during my previous test it had been "logical". Using windows7 it creates all new drives as Primary. This is ofc the case for my second HD connected to a separate connector. So to make sure if this was the problem i downloaded Partition Wizard Home Edition 4.2.2 and made my second HD "logical" but still no help, i still ended up with a mounted .VHD.
During my successful run i migrated from WinXP to Win7 so i decided to simply Install XP with partitioning and all and see if it works better this time.
To my surprise after installing Win7 and going through the steps above it actually started to work again to boot from a VHD.
Now i was almost sure what had caused all the problem so to verify it again i had to install Win7 and repartition...... One hour later comparing the difference when using WinXP to partition and Win7 to partition had been a 100Mbyte "extra partition created by Win7"!!!
Windows 7 obviously does not require to have this since it works just fine without it but if you give the installer a new drive it will always make this partition which it says it is for "System Usage".
Bottom line is if this partition exist in your system you will not be able to boot from your .VHD file!
It took me several days to get to this conclusion so i hope i save some headache for some others.
It would also be great if Acronis staff could comment on this topic and the reason why it fails to boot when windows 7 is creating the partitions. Since TI is suppose to support win7 i would call this a bug but perhaps this is a limitation or a known problem?

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I have Win7Ultimate 64-bit, and the "System Reserved" partition, and regularly boot to VHDs. However, getting there was quite an adventure, as I suffered the same problems as Reza, in that the system would boot, but it would "fall back" to the native system, and just leave the VHD mounted.
I never did have much luck using the TIH 2010 Boot Sequence Manager to directly convert a .TIB to a .VHD and have it work. Like Reza, I suspected that the "System Reserved" partition probably had something to do with it.
On a clean install to an un-allocated partition, Win7 creates the "System Reserved" partition to hold the boot loader, recovery environment, and bitlocker, if used. In Disk Manager, you should see this partition marked as "System, Actiive, Primary Partition". You should see your Win7 OS partition as "Boot, Primary". It should NOT be "Active", nor should it show as "System". If it shows "System" and/or "Active", then the bootloader getting used resides with the OS files, and the one in the "System Reserved" partition is getting bypassed. I think this is where the confusion starts. The bootloader is configured correctly to boot from a VHD, but since the bootloader is in the partition that already has a "native" OS, it gets confused, and ends up booting to the OS in the native partition. When I was having problems, my OS partition was "System, Active, Boot". I removed the "Active" bit from my OS partition, and made sure the "System Reserved" partition was "Active", then ran the Win7 startup recovery. This moved the active bootloader back to the "System Reserved" partition.
The steps I now use to boot to VHD with a "System Reserved" partition:
- Verify that the "System Reserved" is "System, Active, Primary" and your native OS partition is only "Boot" and NOT "System" and/or "Active". Sometimes you'll see that "System Reserved" has had a drive letter assigned. It doesn't need one to work.
- Use DiskManager to create and initialize a new VHD. Leave it mounted and un-allocated.
- Run TIH 2010 Recovery and restore your OS partition to the VHD. Select the un-allocated VHD, and be sure to change the recovery options to create the partition as "Primary", but DO NOT check the "Mark the partition as active" checkbox.
- Do not restore the MBR.
- If your archive has the "System Reserved" partition, DO NOT restore it. You only want the OS partition.
- When the Restore completes, I usually use disk manager to change the drive letter to "V:", and re-label it so I know it's a VHD file I'm booted to (i.e. WIN7U_VHD).
- Unmount the VHD, and use the Acronis Boot Sequence Manager to add the VHD to the bootloader.
It takes a tad longer than using the Boot Sequence Manager to directly convert a .TIB to a .VHD, but you definately have more control over what's being done.
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@garryj
I'm saving your instructions in case I want to revisit that issue. Appreciate hearing someone else's experiences.
My Computer Management is out of control. I have TWO drives other than the C drive which are active and Windows 7 keeps trying to use them as boot drives. I have to go into my BIOS and set them as disabled in the hard drive boot sequence every once in a while when my computer decides not to boot.
Never have figured out how to make a drive NOT ACTIVE.
I DID have the unallocated disk spaces BEFORE I installed Windows 7.
I still have no Boot Sequencer listed in my Acronis 2010 even though I did a clean reinstall (well, as clean as seems to be possible at the moment).
See screenshot:
http://files.myopera.com/creegah/files/comp_management.JPG
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I haven't found a way in DiskManager to return a primary partition to "Inactive" once it has been set to "Active", but you can do it with diskpart or most 3rd party partition editing tools. I suspect that it was a deliberate decision, as making the wrong partition "Inactive" is definately not a good thing.
In looking at your volume list, I don't see anything unusual for a Win7 installation that doesn't use the "System Reserved" partition, but the screenshot didn't show the physical disks, so I'm guessing a bit on the partition layout. If your BIOS presents the disk with your Win7 installation first, I can't explain why you have the occasional boot problems, unless the drive with the OS is misbehaving sometimes at startup.
When you did your re-install of Win7, was it to an unallocated partition, or a pre-formatted one?
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Also, I fogot to mention that the Acronis Boot Sequence Manager doesn't do anything special when it comes to booting from VHD, aside from the auto-convert from .TIB to .VHD.
Bcdedit can be used to get a VHD into the boot list, but it's a lot easier to get things messed up . There are quite a few ways to skin the boot-from-VHD cat.
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garryj:
Thanks for sharing the details of your experience with VHD boot. I presume that the Acronis Boot Sequence Manager simply writes an entry to the BCD and lets Windows 7 bootmgr handle the boot process. When I experimented with VHD boot, I just manually created an entry in the BCD using bcdedit.
Hope:
Like garryj said, almost any partitioning tool will allow you to clear the boot flag on a partition. If you don't have a partitioning program and simply want to clear the boot flags, download the Symantec Partition Table Editor from here:
ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/PTED…
Unzip the program and place it on your desktop. On Windows 7 or Vista, right-click and choose "Run as administrator" to start, and you'll see your disk's partition table as below:
The Active partition has an entry of 80 in the "Boot" column; change it to 00 to clear the active flag. Make sure that you have chosen the correct disk from the drop-down box at the top of the screen!
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l@K0LO
I don't think my other drives have boot flags (I use Gparted to remove them if present), W7 just seems to keep changing the default boot drive in my HP m8100y for no apparent reason.
To Everyone Else:
I created a vhd of one of my W7 backups and then used the directions on the page below to successfully create a boot menu with a VHD choice and then booted into it. WARNING: The vhd file EXPANDS to about 4 times its size when you boot into it so you have to have lots of extra space available on your C Drive. Maye it's possible to locate it on a different drive; I didn't try that.
Before you get too excited, the boot into the vhd makes for a VERY SLOW experience. Every move gets an long hourglass.
www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/625-boot-vhd-using-windows-7-a.html
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Hope wrote:...W7 just seems to keep changing the default boot drive in my HP m8100y for no apparent reason.
Windows cannot do that; only the BIOS can change the default boot drive. Check the settings in BIOS setup. Some PCs have two sets of boot device settings; one to control which device boots first (CD, Network, HDD, etc) and another to control HDD priority (HDD1, HDD2, etc).
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Mark:
Yeah, it IS changed in the BIOS but the reason I say Windows 7 is doing it is because I've had this computer for 3 years with Vista on it and only after I installed Windows 7 on it did I start having the hard drive boot priority order getting changed in the BIOS.
I am not the only one with this problem; many postings on the net about Windows 7 doing this and also throwing boot files onto any extra drive you have installed in your computer and causing havoc when you try to reboot.
They say to disconnect ANY other drives connected to your computer when you install Windows 7 to prevent this problem.
It all probably has to do with their attempt to keep people from cloning an install of W7 and giving it to a friend or something...probably that's also causing a lot of Acronis' problems.
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Hope:
Call me skeptical but I don't see how that can possibly happen. Could you refer me to one of these "many postings on the net" about Windows 7 changing settings in the BIOS - I couldn't find any by doing a quick search.
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Mark:
I downloaded the Symantec utility and the drive which contains my W7 install is listed as drive THREE. My backup drive is listed as TWO and my Removable SATA drive (Vantec Ez Swap) is listed as ONE.
This is probably my problem. I changed the 80 to 00 on my backup drives. Maybe this will fix it.
It's an intermittent problem (the worst kind) so I won't know for a while, but if this fixes it, I owe you a debt of gratitude.
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Mark:
Here are some similar postings about the boot files going on the wrong drive:
http://www.sevenforums.com/installation-setup/37210-windows-7-boot-mana…
http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/39949-back-up-functi…
http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/42136-change-hard-drive-boo…
http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/42136-change-hard-drive-boo…
http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/49421-troubleshooting-sta…
http://www.sevenforums.com/installation-setup/12512-windows-boot-manage…
No, my exact problem is not listed.
I also found out about it by trying to do the Windows Backup and it tried to backup my 1 TB backup drive instead of my C drive.
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Hope wrote:Mark: ...My backup drive is listed as TWO and my Removable SATA drive (Vantec Ez Swap) is listed as ONE. This is probably my problem...
That very well could be. Many motherboards will enumerate (number)disks in a specific order, usually IDE disks first followed by SATA disks, but this is motherboard-specific. It would be less confusing if your primary boot disk was enumerated as drive ONE (0x80h). You would have to search your motherboard documentation to see if there is any way to control this.
Since the problem is intermittent, I suspect it may be caused by the motherboard enumerating the disks differently on occasion. Clearing the ACTIVE flag on all but the W7 partition may work, hopefully.
After looking over the posts in your reply #12, I see what's being discussed, and it's not an issue caused by Windows 7. Vista will also act the same. Most of the posts discussed problems encountered in multiboot setups and were by users who were unaware of the location of their boot files. The Windows installer normally searches for the active partition on the first hard disk and installs the boot files there. This means that if you have XP (Vista) already installed and you then install Vista (Win 7), the boot files will go in the XP (Vista) partition. This has always been the case and it leads to a situation where a user will, without thinking it through, delete the old OS and wind up with an unbootable PC (since the boot files were in the old OS partition that he just deleted).
The only new wrinkle with Windows 7 is that the installer will create a 100 MB boot partition on a blank disk. This is done for convenience in setting up BitLocker encryption later, which requires that the boot files be on an unencrypted volume. But instead, if you direct the installer to install to an existing ACTIVE partition that is large enough, Win 7 will not create a separate boot partition and will dump everything into the one partition. Or, if you install to a disk with an older Windows OS present, the boot files will go in the currently ACTIVE partition and W7 will go to its own partition (user choice).
Most of the referenced posts were by users that were unaware of the location of their Windows 7 boot files - on some of the posts the boot files were on an entirely different disk.
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Mark:
That was my ORIGINAL problem...dual boot of vista and W7 and boot files and boot folder wound up on my other drives. Kept having to do a boot repair with the W7 disk and then I discovered that the HDD priority list in the BIOS was being rearranged and learned how to go into the BIOS and change that every time I could not boot.
Well, hopefully, the changing of the boot flag through the Symantec utility will fix the problem permanently.
Thanks.
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If not, see if there is a BIOS setting for disk recognition timeout. Maybe one of your disks comes up too slowly on occasion, and is not enumerated properly.
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That's another way of doing it I guess And im glad you guys share
your problem and solutions so it might help others.
@garryj:
Would it not be easier to remove the win7 unneeded partition?
This way you be able to take full advantage of TI functionality
like the boot manager and no need to modify anything.
I used winxp cd for partitioning my primary HD myself and it works great now.
Everything else (other HD partitioning) can be done by freeware tools in win7.
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@Reza:
If your "native" system is laid out properly, the "System Reserved" partition is pretty much a non-issue. I think the core of the "fall back to native OS" problem that we both experienced was probably bacause the "System Reserved" partition and the Win7 OS partition had competing boot managers. Now that the only boot manager on my system resides in the "Systerm Reserved" partition, everything is working peachy. If, on your fist boot into the VHD, you get the "Windows was not shut down properly" screen, IMO odds are that things will not go well.
I can now use the TIH Boot Sequence Manager to directly convert a .TIB->VHD and it will boot into the VHD, just as advertised. The steps I listed in post #2 are way overkill now, but still useful as an academic exercise :-). The nice thing about restoring the archive to a VHD is that you can pick and choose restore options regarding partition creation and placement.
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garryj wrote:If, on your fist boot into the VHD, you get the "Windows was not shut down properly" screen, IMO odds are that things will not go well. .
Ahh ok, i thought you did all those steps still.
And your absolutely right about the fist boot into the VHD. Every time i got the "Windows was not shut down properly" then it meant something was wrong so i had to test a different thing but at least now we know what causes this ;)
I find the virtualisation extremely useful and actually run almost 100% on VHD now since it works so great and i dont notice any slowdown.
Hopefully Acronis developers will read this thread and come up with a clever solution for the next update or atleast mention is as a limitation in the document.
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Reza Ghorbani wrote:I find the virtualisation extremely useful and actually run almost 100% on VHD now since it works so great and i dont notice any slowdown.
Most definately very useful. Being able to use differencing disks adds a whole new level of versatility. Great stuff!
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