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I installed Windows 2000 on Virtualbox. Is it possible to extract the contents of the VHD to another drive(all folders and all files) and use easybcd or bcdedit to add Win2k as a option in the bootloader? If it is possible, how could one achieve that? And would it work if I have a i5-2430M processor with 16 gigs of ram as well as a SATA HDD?

LeninYT
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1 Answers1

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AFAIK, Windows 2000 does not recognize SATA drives. I installed Windows 2000 in a VirtualBox VM on an PATA (IDE) drive, then added SP4 and the Update Rollup 1 for Win2k SP 4 (KB891861). Next, I added a SATA drive and could not get Windows 2000 to recognize the SATA drive. The host machine has an Intel Core i5-2400S CPU @ 2.50GHz. Due to these results, this answer will assume the contents of VHD file containing Windows 2000 will be copied to a physical PATA drive.

The Windows 2000 was installed in a guest VM, which hardware differs from the host machine. When first booting in the host, the Windows 2000 installation will detect changes in the hardware and most likely request drivers for the new hardware found. You should either have copied any known drivers to the PATA drive in advance or have them available on a USB flash drive. Windows 2000 may not recognize USB 3.0 or newer, which can be a problematic, if both the USB port and flash drive are capable of USB 3.0 or newer. Such problems can be eliminated by forcing USB 2.0 usage by connecting through a USB 2.0 extension cable such as this one.

Note: There is also the possibility that Windows 2000 will not boot at all using your current physical hardware configuration.

Copying the VHD to a PATA drive.

Linux and macOS can copy MBR partitioned drives by using the dd command. A Windows version of this command can be acquired by downloading ddrelease64.exe (or the 32 bit dd-0.6beta3.zip) from chrysocome.net. This instructions for use can be found here.

  • A bootable 64 bit Windows 7 with SP1 is installed on a 160 GiB SATA drive with separate system and boot volumes.
  • The 80 GiB PATA drive where Windows 2000 is to be copied is installed as the Primary Master IDE drive.
  • The file containing the Windows 2000 installation drive is named W2000.vhd and is in my Desktop folder. The size of the drive is 4 GiB.
  • The ddrelease64.exe file is in my Desktop folder.

The steps are given below.

  1. Open a Command Prompt window as an administrator.
  2. Enter the command below to change current directory to my Desktop folder. 
    cd /d %userprofile%\desktop
  3. Use the diskpart command to attach the VHD file and offline the disks to be copied from and to. An example is given below. 
    C:\Users\dma\Desktop>diskpart

    Microsoft DiskPart version 6.1.7601
Copyright (C) 1999-2008 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: WINDOWS7
    

    DISKPART> list disk
    

    Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
    

    

    Disk 0    Online           80 GB      0 B
  Disk 1    Online          160 GB      0 B
    

    DISKPART> select disk 0
    

    Disk 0 is now the selected disk.
    

    DISKPART> clean
    

    DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.
    

    DISKPART> offline disk
    

    DiskPart successfully offlined the selected disk.
    

    DISKPART> select vdisk file=%userprofile%\desktop\w2000.vhd
    

    DiskPart successfully selected the virtual disk file.
    

    DISKPART> attach vdisk
    

    100 percent completed
    

    DiskPart successfully attached the virtual disk file.
    

    DISKPART> offline disk
    

    DiskPart successfully offlined the selected disk.
    

    DISKPART> list disk
    

    Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
    

    

    Disk 0    Offline          80 GB    80 GB
  Disk 1    Online          160 GB      0 B
    

      

    • Disk 2    Offline        4096 MB     8 MB
      • 

    

    DISKPART> exit
    

    Leaving DiskPart...
    

    C:\Users\dma\Desktop>
  4. Based on the above output, the following command can be used to copy the Windows 2000 installation from the VHD file to the PATA drive. 
    ddrelease64 if=\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition0 bs=1M --size --progress of=\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0
    An example is given below. 
    C:\Users\dma\Desktop>ddrelease64 if=\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition0 bs=1M --size --progress of=\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0
rawwrite dd for windows version 1.0beta1 WIN64.
Written by John Newbigin <jnewbigin@chrysocome.net>
This program is covered by terms of the GPL Version 2.

    4,096M
4096+0 records in
4096+0 records out
    

    C:\Users\dma\Desktop>
  5. Use the diskpart command to detach the VHD file and online the PATA disk. An example is given below. 
    C:\Users\dma\Desktop>diskpart

    Microsoft DiskPart version 6.1.7601
Copyright (C) 1999-2008 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: WINDOWS7
    

    DISKPART> rescan
    

    Please wait while DiskPart scans your configuration...
    

    DiskPart has finished scanning your configuration.
    

    DISKPART> select vdisk file=%userprofile%\desktop\w2000.vhd
    

    DiskPart successfully selected the virtual disk file.
    

    DISKPART> detach vdisk
    

    DiskPart successfully detached the virtual disk file.
    

    DISKPART> select disk 0
    

    Disk 0 is now the selected disk.
    

    DISKPART> online disk
    

    DiskPart successfully onlined the selected disk.
    

    DISKPART> list volume
    

    Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
    

    

    Volume 0     E                       DVD-ROM         0 B  No Media
  Volume 1         System Rese  NTFS   Partition    100 MB  Healthy    System
  Volume 2     C   Windows7     NTFS   Partition    159 GB  Healthy    Boot
  Volume 3     D   Windows2000  NTFS   Partition   4086 MB  Healthy
    

    DISKPART> exit
    

    Leaving DiskPart...
    

    C:\Users\dma\Desktop>

Booting with Windows 7 installed on a SATA drive.

Here the assumption the computer can be configured to boot directly from the SATA drive. The PATA drive containing Windows 2000 is installed to be the Primary Master IDE drive. Windows 7 with SP1 included is installed on the SATA drive with separate system and boot volumes.

To add Windows 2000 to the boot menu, follow the steps given below. Many of the Windows commands will need to be entered in an "Administrator: Command Prompt" window.

  1. Boot to Windows 7.

  2. If necessary, assign a drive letter to the system volume. The command below caption of the system volume.

    C:\Windows\system32>wmic volume get caption,systemvolume | find "TRUE"
\\?\Volume{38b0211e-6c7f-11ef-aa46-806e6f6e6963}\  TRUE

    An alternative, to using the deprecated wmic command, would be to use the following Power Shell command.

    PS C:\Users\dma> gwmi win32_volume | where-object {$_.systemvolume -match "True"} | foreach-object { echo "$(echo $_.caption)"}
\\?\Volume{38b0211e-6c7f-11ef-aa46-806e6f6e6963}\

    The output of both commands show the system volume has not be assigned a drive letter. The command below does this.

    mountvol s: \\?\Volume{38b0211e-6c7f-11ef-aa46-806e6f6e6963}\

  3. Edit the Boot Configuration Data (BCD) file.

    The command below add Windows 2000 to the bcd file on the system volume. Note that Windows 2000 is installed the volume assign the drive letter D:. Note: you probably can omit entering /store s:\boot\bcd.

    bcdedit /store s:\boot\bcd /create {ntldr} /d "Windows 2000"
bcdedit /store s:\boot\bcd /set {ntldr} device partition=d:
bcdedit /store s:\boot\bcd /set {ntldr} path \ntldr
bcdedit /store s:\boot\bcd /displayorder {ntldr} /addlast

  4. Copy boot files from Windows 2000 volume to the system volume. If the firmware ranks the PATA drive as disk 0 and the SATA drive as disk 1, then this step is unnecessary. However, if the opposite occurs then ntldr will look for boot.ini and NTDETECT of the system volume. The commands below copy these files to the system volume.

    cd /d d:\
attrib -h -s boot.ini
copy boot.ini s:\
attrib +h +s boot.ini
attrib +h +s s:\boot.ini
attrib -h -s NTDETECT.COM
copy NTDETECT.COM s:\
attrib +h +s NTDETECT.com
attrib +h +s +r s:\NTDETECT.com

    Enter the command below to edit the boot.ini file on the system volume.

    notepad s:\boot.ini

    Below is the original contents.

    [boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional"
/fastdetect

    The contents should be change to the following. Basically, replace rdisk(0) with rdisk(1).

    [boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional"
/fastdetect

  5. Since the system volume was not originally assigned a drive letter, the next command is entered which remove the assign letter of S:.

    mountvol s: /d

Booting with Windows 7 installed on a PATA drive.

The PATA drive containing Windows 7 with SP1 included is installed with separate system and boot volumes to be the Primary Master IDE drive. The PATA drive containing Windows 2000 is installed to be the Secondary Master IDE drive. With this configuration, the steps would be the same as the given in the previous section.

References

David Anderson
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