In this demo, I show you a cool way to install multiple Windows operating systems on the same pc. No virtualization and No disk partitioning required. It's simple to add or remove an operating system at any time.
Just wow! Thank you bro I have a few customers where my peoduct does not work on there windows version I always told them to use dual boot but they just don’t get it to work with this it will be 100% easier video is so easy and just such a smart and nice way todo it Thank you!
One downside of this is that unless the host windows drive is protected the other OS can access the files. Say you downloaded a malware’virus that compromise those files. This should be used with care if intent is to protect your host OS. If direct hardware access isn’t needed then any Hypervisor to run a VM would be better.
Good point. I wonder if you could disable host OS from the Disk Management Utility so it's not accessible when booted into the other OS, I'll try it and let you know.
Hello. Very very interesting method ! Thx ! Can you answer me these two questions ? 1) Is there a significant perfomance impact, when running windows from a vhd ? 2) Is there any program or method on the planet to HIDE the "Parent OS drives", perceived from each respective Sub-OS ? I mean on a very early, low-level layer. I would even buy a specific mainboard for just that
There is no noticeable difference in performance when running on a VHD. Regarding hiding the parent OS drive, I think you could remove the drive letter assigned to it in the disk management utility which would prevent the drive from showing up in file explorer. I’ll test it and let you know.
@@ClickNextDemos Aww, nice of you, but don't bother. I think of viruses. Imagine one "dirty" OS for gaming and risky stuff, and one "clean" OS for your business/work needs. I would not trust the "shallow" hiding via disk management utility. I think real Gurus could do some magic on an EFI console, on very specific mainboards.... I'm just looking into "OcuLink" right now, maybe one can easily swap around NVMEs like Cartridges :)
I think it will be very difficult to the hide the parent OS. There is an option in Disk Management to remove drive letters, but this is not available in this scenario. I found a 3rd party partition utility that does hide the Parent OS but this also caused the parent OS to then stop booting. I think the next best option is just change the drive letter to something like Z: which you are unlikely to use. Another option is to explore the possibility of using NTFS permissions and setting the file to "Deny" access for the user you are logged in with. Not an ideal solution, I know.
This is a great video thank you. I do have a question i have 2 m.2 drives on my pc 1 is a 990pro and the other a 970. The parent os is on the 970, i will call c drive. I want to install a second copy of windows of the 990 as gaming only. Could i just install windows to that other drive without making a virtual drive on the 990? Im sorta confused as to where the boot originates. I know in my bios it looks at the 970 first. I would like to see a video with 2 physical hdds have the boot choice
Hi @SilentStorm585. - Great question. Yes, you absolutely can install nother copy of Windows on a second disk. It can be a real disk, it doesn't have to be a virtual disk. Follow the same process in the video but ignore the bit about creating a virtual disk. Just ensure both disks are connected then boot the PC from your Windows installation media and follow the setup wizard. When it asks "Where do you want to install Windows", just select your second disk from the list. Your original parent OS will most likely show as disk 0, and the second disk (the 990) will show as disk 1. If the 990 has been used before, you will want to delete all the existing volumes/partions fist, then highlight the disk and click install. (So backup any data you want to keep from the 990 before formatting). Windows wil then install to the second disk. The Windows setup wizard will modify the boot info on your parent OS to add the boot menu, just like it shows in this video. If you decided to go ahead and do this, let me know how you get on.
Do you know how I can change a boot partition for Windows 11 to also boot Windows 10 from a different drive? Also, can I copy an existing boot partition from one drive to another and still be able to boot my OS after deleting the original?
I don't think you will be able use this method with Windows XP unfortunately. I don't beleive Windows XP has the ability install to a VHD. It has a completely different installation type to that of Windows Vista and above.
for some reason CMD.exe will not allow me to selct any other disk apart from the USB which comes onto the command prompt as X:\sources>. . I can see the disk where i put the virtual directory with diskpart. and see all the volumes too. But It wont allow me to change drives. The (. : ) does not work.
How does this work with BitLocker? Can the "child" os be installed on an encrypted drive? Will it have access to parent drive? Seems like this method doesn't really isolate installations from each other. Otherwise, very cool, didnt know you could use virtual drives in win installer.
Good question about bitlocker. I haven't tried it, but no reason it shouldn't work. When you boot from the Windows installation media to install the child OS, you would need to unlock the encrypted drive first, then this would allow you to mount the virtual disk. The next question is whether the Windows installation media supports unlocking Bitlocker. drives. If it doesn't you would need mount boot.wim on the installation media and inject the bitlocker module. I've done this on WinPE media to add bitlocker support, but never tried it on Windows 11 installation media, although I expect you can do it.
edit: fixed by simply assigning a letter to the partition When I try this method, using Ventoy as you did, the partition that has the VHDX file doesn't have a letter in disk part, therefore I can't mount the vhdx file since I can't CD to that drive, why is that?
Hi @stearless I didn't use Ventoy to create this dual method. The only reason you see any mention of Ventoy is becuase my Windows 11 installation media is on a Ventoy USB. I should have used a regular USB drive with Windows 11 installation media to avoid any confusion. Hope that makes sense. I'm glad you fixed it.
@@stearless I re-read your original comment and understand what you mean now. Yes, you can simply assign a drive letter the partition that has the VHDX file if it doesn't already have a drive letter assigned. You can use this command from within the Diskpart utility assign letter= For example, to assign the letter D: to the partition, from within the diskpart utility, you would use the following-: assign letter=D Thanks for sharing that, it will help others who want to try this out.
@@ClickNextDemos edit: again answering my own question, I just booted into the virtual system and expanded to the available unallocated space within disk management, cheers Could you explain how to expand the vhdx file afterwards, I set it to 30GB but it became full very quickly, expanded it via disk part from main OS to 50, but when I boot into it it's still 30GB, what am I doing wrong?
This is a popular request but unfortunately, I haven't found a way to successfully do this. It doesn't seem possible to do from within the OS itself. but I did find a 3rd party utility which had this feature, but when I tried it, it caused the OS to fail to boot.
plz show us how to Install Ubuntu Linux to VHDX , i want to dual boot linux with windows 11 but since its very complicated process i was unable to install linux till today due to some errors but this method is truly revolutionary i didnt knew this method even though I'm using windows OS for 10 years , teach us how to install linux in similar way .......
I have an old PC with Windows 8...and just purchased a new Windows 11 machine. If I move the old hard drive to the new computer, how can I set this up? I dont need to install windows as I am moving over the entire hard drive.
It's possible to do, but I'm not sure why anyone would want to do this. You could just move the drive to the new pc, and it should boot ok but you will likely need to install some drivers for the hardware in the new pc. Also, it depends on why you want to do this as there may be a better way. If you just want to access some of the applications and data from your Windows 8 PC, you could consider converting that Windows 8 Phyiscal disk to a virtual disk. You can convert the Windows 8 disk to a virtual disk, then use Virtualisation software on your new Windows 11 PC and create a virtual machine and attach the virtual disk to this virtual machine. You could then run your Windows 8 OS inside your Windows 11 machine. You could use Hyper-V, Oracle Virtual Box, or VMWare Workstation to run the Windows 8 VM. These are all free virtualisation apps.
The solution mentioned worked for me. I own an Acer Predator Helios 16 laptop, which originally came with Windows 11, including pre-installed drivers and applications. When I installed a new operating system from the Microsoft site, all the pre-installed software was removed. I'm curious if there's a way to create a copy of the laptop's original operating system, complete with the pre-installed software, since the Windows license is included. I would like to install this copy in a VHDX file.
Yes, you can do this, take a look at Sysinternals Disk2VHD utility - learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd It's relatively simple to convert a real disk to an virtial disk. It might be a bit tricky getting it to boot using this multi-boot method but certainly should be possibe.
@@ClickNextDemos Thank you for the suggestion! I've taken a closer look at the Sysinternals Disk2VHD utility based on your recommendation. It appears that while this tool is indeed capable of converting a physical disk into a virtual hard disk (VHD or VHDX), there's a specific limitation that affects its use on the same machine where the conversion is performed. According to the guidance provided on the linked page, attaching the generated VHD or VHDX to the same system it was created on for booting purposes is advised against. This is because Windows will alter the disk signature of the VHD to prevent a signature clash with its source disk. The boot configuration database (BCD) in Windows uses disk signatures to identify disks, leading to a potential scenario where Windows, when booted within a VM, cannot find the boot disk due to the changed signature. I'm curious if there's an alternative approach or a workaround for this limitation that still allows for the use of the same machine. Your thoughts or any differing perspective on this would be greatly appreciated.
@@KaustubhKelvekar I've never thought about doing what you are trying to do, but failing Sysinternals Disk2VHD. another idea off the top of my head is to capture your original OS, including drivers and apps etc using the DISM utility (and WinPE). A bit of a learning curve if you have not used it before but may be an option for doing what you want to do. You would capture your OS to a WIM file. Then deploy that WIM file to a VHDX file. Not entirely sure if it's possible to do that but worth looking into.
I have created a VHDx disk of 80 GB with its file saved in my Storage drive. Now i want to delete the Virtual Drive, Its just created, nothing installed or saved into the Disk-Virtual. Now i want to reclaim the spaced given to the disk. Here THE DISK means Virtual disk.
You can simply delete the vhdx file like any other file and the disk space will be reclaimed back to your main OS. You need to make sure the vhdx disk is unmounted so the file is not in use, otherwise it will not allow you to delete it.
i have a 500gb ssd and i put a windows 10 installation on it, i need to have gparted and the windows installer both seperate to boot into but even following this tutorial, i dont get the option to boot into these, any ideas?
If I'm correct in thinking Gparted is Linux based, then you won't be able to use this method of dual booting for that, as it only supports dual booting with Windows OS. To dual boot with Linux, you would need to use a Partition Manager to reduce the main partition of the disk, then create a new partition for the Linux installation or let the Linux installer create the partition during installation.
@@ClickNextDemos currently ive figure out to install windows and then later install ubuntu and install gparted on ubuntu instead, this seems to work, however i tried to install windows on the partition which i wanted to be MBR for campatability with recovering backups, this insanely backfired and the disk ended up being gpt anyways, then i tried again with a smaller disk, making sure its mbr before installing, this however also gave me a GPT disk, so i gave up on trying that and instead installed ubuntu like i said, now however windows always says it cant boot and its because the drive where i installed windows a second time was no longer connected and i had already flashed, now everytime windows boots it says it cant and then i have to manually make it boot the connected harddrive, i have no idea how to fix this
Hi, good question. I don't believe so, although you could install any Linux Distro alongside the main parent/host OS using the traditional linux installation methods which involve repartitioning the disk. So this would be combining the multiple Windows OS's using VHDX files and a "real" Linux partition. So I think the answer to your question is really no, but it's still possible to dual boot linux. It's just not as flexible and simple to change/revert back as the Windows OS on a virtual disk. Hope that makes sense.
Hello! I wasn't able to install Windows 10 because of my disk format being in mbr, I tried converting the virtual disk into gpt and was prompted this error message: We couldn't install windows in the location you chose. 0x80300024. Is there anyway for me to fix it without converting my actual existing c drive into gpt?
The disk format of your real disk should not make any difference. Are you following the steps to create a new Virtual Disk, then mounting that new virtual disk during the installation process before you hit install? You need to mount your virtual disk, then click on Refresh which should then show a new blank disk in which you can install Windows 10 to.
@@ClickNextDemos I have followed everything up till 6:57, which gave me this error message: We couldn't create a new partition or locate an existing one. After that I followed the first Microsoft Blog which I found by searching the error message up. I also looked at another yt video about this error message, in which a comment suggested to try converting the disk into gpt format, leading to the error message in my first comment.
I'm not sure why its going wrong for you. You have created a brand new disk which doesn't have any data or disk type asscoiated to it, so once you have attached the virtual disk using the attach vdisk command, you should be able to click on Refresh, then select your NEW virtual disk and it should start installing it again. You could try creating a new virtual disk and try installing to that, in case the first disk you created has corrupted in some way. Good luck.
This method is specifically for Windows Operating Systems only. You could combine this with the traditional dual boot method where you repartition your HDD/SSD and create a parition where you could install Linux alongside your existing Windows OS plus any Virtual Microsoft OS
This is such a cool feature, but I just have few question... 1. Activation - My laptop came with OEM licence...so if I install multiple OS, let's say my host is win11 and I want to install win10...will win10 be activated? 2. Drive selecting options: As of now, I have a 512GB SSD as my main drive and a 1TB SSD as my secondary drive. Can I do the same but instead have the vhdx files in my secondary drive? 3. I have veracrypt encryption enabled (win11 Home..no bitlocker unfortunately), do I have to disable veracrypt to use this feature? I know these might be silly, but I really like this feature and want to use it. Help is appreciated..
Hi, great questions. I wish I would have thought about that when making the video. The answer to question 2 is yes, you can put the VHDX file anywhere, as long as your pc can see the disk then it will work fine. To give you an accurate answer to question 1 and 3 - I would need to test it which I will try and do for you. I think if your pc is already activated for Windows 10 I think it will automatically activate Windows 11 and the first OS will continue to be activated. I'll test it out. Regarding the veracrypt, I'm pretty sure you would need to decrypt the drive first, install all your OS then re-encrypt the drive. It would certainly complicate things and you would lose the ability to mount other VHDX files from one OS if you wanted to access files on them, but you might not want or need to do that anyway. Will try and test and let you know the outcome.
You could add a Linux OS but not using this method, you would need to install it to a seperate disk or partition, but it could co-exist with multiple versions of Windows using this method. Hope that helps and thanks for the question.
