For the last six weeks, my portable PC of choice has been an ASUS Zenbook UX31E. It’s a wonderful little machine—light, fast, fun to use, and a great example of what’s right with the whole Ultrabook category.
I wanted to try Windows 8 on this machine, but I didn’t want to mess up a perfectly good Windows 7 installation. This is, after all, a machine I use for work, and Windows 8 is still a beta, with some rough edges.
The Zenbook has a 128GB SSD, which is fine for a secondary work PC but not enough to split in half for a conventional dual-boot setup. And there’s no way to upgrade that built-in drive. After a few milliseconds of thought, I rejected the idea of trying to shrink my existing disk partition so I could pull that off.
I still have a single SSD with a single partition. But this is what I see at startup:
The actual steps for creating a virtual hard disk (VHD) and installing Windows 8 on it are very simple. The hardest part, in my experience, is wrapping your mind around exactly how this procedure works. So in this post I’m going to explain everything in detail, in the clearest, simplest language I can. Follow along, and I am confident it will work for you too.
First things first. To make this work, you need the following ingredients:
And one extra caution: If you’ve protected your system drive with BitLocker encryption, stop right now. This will just make you cry.
Download the Windows 8 Consumer Preview ISO file and use the download tool to make a bootable USB flash drive or DVD:
You are now ready to begin the process of creating a virtual hard disk and installing Windows 8.
It is possible to use the command line Diskpart tool to do everything I describe in this how-to. If you’re comfortable with that, you are a ninja. You don’t need me.
The procedure I describe here uses the absolute minimum number of command-line steps. For this portion of the job, we’ll use the Disk Management console.
Open Windows Explorer, right-click Computer in the navigation pane on the left side of the window, and click Manage in the shortcut menu. That opens the Computer Management console.
Click Disk Management in the pane on the left side of the window and wait until you see all currently installed disks in the contents pane, as shown here:
As you can see, this machine has a single hard disk (with the tiny 100MB boot partition and a much larger partition used for Windows and all data files).
Click the Action menu and you’ll see two VHD options. Click Create VHD to get started.
I created a VHD folder on the C drive because it’s easy to remember, but you can put the VHD file anywhere you want and give it any name you want. Specify a size (I’ve used 60GB here). In Windows 7, you can choose between a Dynamically expanding virtual hard disk or a Fixed sizeVHD. Which one you choose doesn’t really matter; just make sure you have enough room on your current physical disk to accommodate the space you specified.
Click OK to create the VHD file and continue. It only takes a few seconds to complete the process, and when it’s done you’ll see a new entry in the Disk Management console.
As far as Windows is concerned, that’s a brand-new 60GB disk you’ve just installed. You don’t need to initialize it or format it or do anything with it at this point. Make a note of the exact path and filename of the VHD you created; you’ll need it shortly. You’ve now done enough to move on to the next phase.
Plug in the bootable USB flash drive or insert the bootable DVD installation media you created earlier and restart your PC. Do whatever it takes to start your computer using that bootable media. When you get to the Windows 8 setup screens, you’re ready
If you’ve installed Windows 8 before, the first few steps here will be straightforward. (In fact, it’s pretty close to the Windows 7 setup experience, too.)
Pick a language (U.S. English is the default), click the Install button, and enter the Windows 8 product key. (Microsoft has helpfully provided two public keys you can use for this task. You can find them
here.)
You have now reached the point where you need to tell Windows that you want to do a custom installation on your new virtual hard disk. But there’s a slight problem at this point: The Windows 8 installer doesn’t know about your virtual hard disk yet. So, just for this one step, you need to dip down into the Windows Command Prompt.
Press Shift+F10 to open a Command Prompt window, where you will type some simple commands. Here’s what it looks like:
Before you can finish this step, you need to know the drive letter that Windows 8 Setup thinks your VHD file is stored on. In the Command Prompt window, type dir C: to confirm that Windows 8 Setup sees your VHD file. If you see the VHD folder, great. If not, try dir D:, dir E:, and so on, until you locate the correct drive letter. (In my test system shown here, the 100MB system partition was recognized as drive C:, and my VHD file was located on drive D:, with a full path of D:\VHD\win8-cp.vhd.)
After confirming those details, type diskpart and press Enter to open the command-line disk partitioning utility.
At the DISKPART prompt, type the following commands:
select vdisk file=c:\vhd\win8-cp.vhd (substitute the full path to your VHD file after the equal sign)
attach vdisk
exit
You can now click the Custom option in the Windows 8 setup dialog box. That takes you to a screen like this one:
Pick the new “drive” you created in the previous step and ignore the bogus error message that says Windows can’t be installed there. It can indeed. Click Next to continue.
You can now complete setup, which will proceed exactly as if you were using a physical hard disk. When you’re done, you’ll have a startup menu where you can choose from Windows 7 or Windows 8, with your most recent installation (Windows 8) as the default. You can use the Msconfig utility to change the default OS back to Windows 7. If you do, the startup menu will change to the plain white text on black background version. If Windows 8 is the default, you get the Metro style graphical boot menu.
You still have only a single physical disk and a single partition, but if you boot to Windows 8 and look in Windows Explorer you’ll see two drives there:
As far as Windows is concerned, that 60GB C: drive is the real thing, even though we both know it’s just a file pretending to be a hard disk.
And that’s it. When you’re done with your testing, you can blow away the Windows 8 installation by booting into Windows 7 and doing two things:
- First, delete the VHD file you created earlier.
- Then, open Msconfig, click the Boot tab, and delete the entry for Windows 8
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