Yes, I want to use R2 for this excercise. Any recommendation on how to set up the volume? I read it is recommended to create a volume e.g. 80Gigs and the VHD 70Gigs but I am wondering if this is really necessary? Any recommendations about the size or setup of the VHD in general? Thank you, M.

Hello together, I bought myself an second internal harddisk and was planning to install Windows Server 2008 on it. A friend of mine mentioned the ability of Windows 7 to create/mount VHDs as outlined here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualization/archive/2009/05/14/native-vhd-support-in-windows-7.aspx. I am now thinking if it make sense to shrink my first HDD and install Server 2008R2 in a VHD or if it would make more sense to perform a 'regular' install either on a new volume on my first HDD or the second HDD as I am planning to use Hyper-V and create several test machines there as well. At the moment my first HDD is encrypted with Bitlocker, do I have to keep an eye on issues there i.e. do I have to decrypt it first? Maybe someone can help me out here? Thank you, M.

Only 2008 R2 has the build in way to boot as VHD. This works fine, I'm using such a Server 2008 R2 VHD over 1 year now. For Server 2008 or Vista you must use this 3rd party solution: http://www.vmlite.com/index.php/products/vboot"A programmer is just a tool which converts caffeine into code" CLIP- Stellvertreter http://www.winvistaside.de/

Yes, I want to use R2 for this excercise. Any recommendation on how to set up the volume? I read it is recommended to create a volume e.g. 80Gigs and the VHD 70Gigs but I am wondering if this is really necessary? this depends what you want to install. I'm using WIM2VHD [1] to create the WIMs. Next I copy them to the loaction where I want them and add them with EasyBCD [2] to the Windows 7 bootmanager. André [1] http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/wim2vhd [2] http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1"A programmer is just a tool which converts caffeine into code" CLIP- Stellvertreter http://www.winvistaside.de/