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I just learned about this fantastic way to run a second copy of Windows 7 on your Win 7 developer workstation and have a dual boot setup.
The new virtualization technology in Windows 7 allows you to create a VHD drive as a secondary boot drive, and then run that as a virtual disk with full access to your hardware and devices. I love this, as I often run lots of beta software, including latest bleeding edge builds of Visual Studio and other media software that over time can just kill my main home or office workstation. Now I can just set up a VHD with a copy of Windows 7, add a differencing disk and then mess it up all I want, then delete the differencing disk and reboot the machine and I’m back to a clean installation.
In order to set this up, I followed the steps documented in the guide that is distributed along with this great PowerShell 2 script called Install-WindowsImage.
The documentation for this handy PowerShell script walks you through how to set up a fresh VHD in Windows 7, and how to load a Windows Image onto that VHD.
I’m going to create VHD’s for both Windows 7 and Server R2 so that I have fresh environments to try out new things in!
Also you might want to check out the WIM2VHD project that is also available at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wim2vhd
The Windows Image to Virtual Hard Disk (WIM2VHD) command-line tool can be used to automate many of the steps above.
