Dual boot Windows 7 with Windows 8- Dynamic Disk

Question

I have a HP Pavilion dm4 notebook with Windows 7 Home Premium preinstalled. Recently, I tried to install Windows 8 Developer Preview on my notebook, but while installing, it only allowed me to insatll it on my primary Windows 7 drive (C:). I had kept one empty partition for Windows 8 but when I selectced that option, the next button at the bottom of the window went grey with an error saying:

Windows cannot boot from this drive....blah blah blah

I searched Google and found another way of doing it by VHD (virtual hard disk). This seemed to work but on restarting it gave me a "VHD_BOOT_INITIALIZATION_FAILED" error. After trying all possible ways for around 10 times, I gave up.

I noticed that the only difference between the tutorials and my notebook is the disk type. They all had Basic and I have Dynamic. Is that the reason I'm not able to boot Windows 8?

Answer 1

One possible failure in booting from VHD I've seen is that when you have a dynamic VHD file with maximum capacity of e.g. 40G, you need to have 40G free space on the physical partition when Windows boots up. Otherwise, you'll get a blue screen.

I'm not sure if the dynamic disk caused your problem. But I can confirm that Windows DOES support booting from a dynamic disk.

Answer 2

Use MiniTool Partition Wizard and convert your dynamic disk to a basic disk.