Second in a 2 part series on the Windows 7/2008 R2 Native boot feature. This part addresses how I implemented Native Boot with the currently more common BIOS boot scenario.

1. Confirmed Boot Sequence is set to BIOS

2. Booted from Windows 2008 R2 media (in physical DVD Drive or iDRAC). 3. At initial GUI screen, press Shift F10 - this will open a command prompt.

Note 1: Supported PERC controller drivers are included with Windows 2008 R2 media.

Note 2: If physical disks do not have existing partition/file system; one will need to be created.



4. Run Diskpart at the command prompt

5. List Disk (to identify the existing Physical Disks)

6. Select disk 0


7. Create Partition Primary Size=2000

• This creates a 2GB partition at beginning of disk that will be used in the install process as the "SYSTEM" disk e.g. the location of the bootldr.

8. Format fs=ntfs quick label=system

9. Create partition primary

This creates a partition the size of the remaining space on the disk - I placed the VHD file on this partition.





10. Format quick fs=ntfs label=data

This created a new partition as NTFS and called it DATA

11. List Volume - List the volumes to see what we have

12. Assign - this will assign the Drive letter as C (i.e. next available drive letter)




13. create vdisk file=c:\HVR2-Boot.vhd maximum=50000 type=fixed

The VHD maximum size must allow enough free space on the physical partition for the pagefile.




14. list vdisk now shows the vdisk as 'added'


15. create partition primary this created a partition on the newly created vdisk

16. attach vdisk

17. Now I switch back to the OS install. After a refresh the 50gb partition is now available with a Warning. The warning just means that windows does not know if the BIOS supports the disk type.

18. Installed the OS normally!