USB-booting a VHD from the internal HDD which has cloned Windows
I have an old PC with Windows 7 installed on a small hard disk. I bought a new big hard disk, 5TB, and want to use this as the boot drive.
Obviously only GPT disks are supported with these storage sizes, but unfortunately my PC isn't UEFI, so only MBR booting of Windows is only supported. Windows installation halts to error message that GPT is not supported.
So this is the dilemma, how to boot a large HDD without UEFI. The PC is mini-size, so no available SATA port for a smaller HDD to spare.
My plan is to clone the old hard disk with Windows installation and place this ~80GB VHD file on the new internal HDD and then use a USB-stick to boot to a bootloader which would mount the VHD as C-drive and then the existing Windows installation would/might continue working without need to reinstall Windows + programs.
Can E2B do this? I have tried to read help material, but I simply don't understands where and how to config the USB stick to mount a VHD for booting. All help appreciated, thanks.
You would be legacy booting from a VHD which is on a GPT 5TB hard disk.
I am not sure if this will work, but why not try?
Note that in legacy mode, the max. sector you can access is 2TB practically (or 4TB theoretical if you have 2x2TB MBR partitions). I would advise making the first GPT NTFS partition less than 2TB or else the legacy BIOS may not be able to access it.
I suggest you make and E2B USB drive with agFM added (you will be prompted).
- Add your VHD to say a 100GB NTFS partition 1 on the 5TB GPT drive
- Boot to E2B and choose the agFM menu option (grub2)
- In the agFM legacy menu, navigate to the VHD on the 5TB hard disk, partition 1
- boot
Even if this does work (and it may not!), you may find that a Windows Update will screw up the Windows boot files on your VHD (or the update may just fail to install and roll back). Windows in legacy mode will be expecting an MBR boot disk and it may get confused!
Another approach which does not need a USB drive is here https://www.aioboot.com/en/gpt-legacy/ - any Qs about AIOBoot should go to the developer - not me!
But again, a subsequent Windows Update may go wrong!
You could instead make two 2TB legacy MBR partitions and just not use the other 1TB.
https://www.aioboot.com/en/partition-4tb-hard-drive/
However, I highly recommend another alternative:
Buy a cheap 128GB or larger SSD and fit that as the boot drive with your Win7 install and connect the 5TB drive as a USB GPT drive by using a cheap USB 3 converter. You will be amazed at the increase in speed by fitting an SSD! You can later buy a cheap USB 3 PCI card to increase the USB access speed of your 5TB drive (I assume your USB ports are USB 2).
Thanks for the help and suggestions. So "agFM" is the tool to play with.
I see that the VHD boot might be quite unreliable "hack".
This is indeed so small form factor PC that no PCI slots, and no USB3 either.
And I would avoid external storage in this case. I have found that USB storage is sometimes unreliable. I have faced a few major data losses when an external USB disk transfer somehow crashed, I believe connection, communication or something to the drive failed badly during write operation and corrupted major part of the data, probably because overwriting file system.
Sure backups should always be off-line, i.e. external USB disks, but I prefer to avoid external storage for normal use, only for backups.
Why would you need 5TB on an old mini PC? I dont understand why you would buy a 5TB internal drive knowing that it wont work on a legacy win7 system. It seems totally the wrong choice.
If there are I/O problems with your USB (and I assume you always use the Safely Remove option before unplugging) maybe you can plug the [USB] 5TB drive into your WiFi router instead of the old miniPC? It will probably be faster and USB3 too.