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I have a bootable VHD that I use on my laptop. I recently bought a desktop and would like to use the VHD on the desktop now rather than on the laptop. I copied the VHD to my desktop's hard drive and created the BCD entry. When I boot my computer and select to boot from the VHD I see the Windows7 spinning "bubbles" which is immediately followed by a blue screen and the computer restarting.

Should it generally be possible to use the VHD copied from my laptop or are there restrictions that would prevent this? If it should be possible, what could be causing my BSOD? I can't see the error message I'm getting as it restarts so quickly.

UPDATE: The error code when booting from the VHD is: 0x0000007b

Thanks.

b3n
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2 Answers2

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You can use the VHD on your other computer in a virtual environment such as VMware.

How to do it: https://superuser.com/a/571912/210682

Windows 8 was the first Windows version that supported to be used with different hardware, so if you had been running Windows, you could have easily copied the VHD. I've been doing it plenty of times. The only time when you can actually copy a Windows 7 based VHD is directly after deploying the vanilla installation before the hardware is recognized and installed.

You could try to remove the unnecessary drivers of the old system and install the necessary ones for the new computer before copying it over. That should work, too.

Community
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Zerobinary99
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As it seems to be quite complicated to copy VHDs between computers due to them being tied directly to the underlying hardware I have decided to create a new VMWare virtual machine to be used on both my laptop and desktop.

See this link for reference: VMWare Workstation Moving a Virtual Machine

b3n
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