We have been slow at work in our adoption of Windows 7. I use my laptop as my primary workstation, and I had “cheated” when I upgraded from XP to Vista and then Window 7 32 bit. My new OS was to be Windows 7 64 bit, and there is no upgrade path. Before I kicked off the test “side by side” OSD load of Win7 64 on my laptop, I wanted to ensure that I did not lose anything.
I started by unencrypting my drive and then capturing it using disk2vhd from SysInternals. I then checked that I had done okay by mounting the drive in the existing Windows 7 32 bit OS. You can do this from the GUI in Disk Management. It looked fine, and I went ahead with the OSD load.
Side by side was supposted to use the USMT to keep my settings. It failed. I tried to use the Easy Transfer Wizard to read the USMT cabs. It failed. I then decided that the clever thing to do was to open my VHD file as a VM in Windows Virtual PC. It failed with “Unmountable_Boot_Volume. Why? There is a 127 GB size limit to VHD files. Found a good article about it here. Instead of starting from scratch, I found a utility, VHD Resizer to shrink the size of the volume. But first, I had to mount the drive in Disk Management to move files off.
Having shrunk the VHD, it mounted without incident. I used the Windows Easy Transfer Wizard to move my files from inside the VM to the host computer. Note that the network transfer failed, and I had to put the CABS on a file share.
I did end up with a working laptop. And now I hope to catch up by posting some of the scripts I have written.