What are the ways to install Windows on VHDX

Question

What installation options do I have when I want to native boot from VHDX?

Answer 1

1 Traditional

1.1 Standard installation from external media

• the installation media is created using Media Creation Tool
  • requires DVD or USB flash drive
• you follow the installation as normal and when it comes to selecting disk you need to press shift+F10 to open command line and use diskpart to create and mount your vhdx
  • you can then select the virtual drive for installation
• the setup will warn you that the disk can't be used for installation but the warning can be skipped and ignored
  • the warning can no longer be skipped when you use installation media created from Media Creation Tool downloaded after Windows 10 Falls update (cca Oct 2017)
    • the warnings include: the selected disk is not the computer's boot disk
    • the selected disk space is not of type esp
    • the selected disk is a surfaced virtual disk
    • you may want to try 1.2 below

1.2 Standard installation from Explorer

• the installation media is created using Media Creation Tool
  • requires DVD, USB flash drive or ISO
• you can run the setup.exe from installation media directly from Windows if you trick it to think it is run from WindowsPE
  • there is really simple temporary registry hack using MiniNT key for this
• standard installation follows then
• the difference with 1.1 is that now:
  • you can use GUI tools instead of diskpart
  • some warnings preventing installation to VHDX that could not be ignored before can be skipped now!

---

2 Imaging

2.1 ImageX

2.2 DISM

• deprecated ImageX

2.3 Convert-WindowsImage.ps1

---

3 Conversion

3.1 Disk2VHD from Sysinternals

• this small tool can snapshot online Windows system into VHDX file that is bootable
• uses Volume Shadow Copy Service to preserve consistency of the snapshot