Ever since the native boot blog post from Scott Hanselman I’ve been running my Windows from a VHD. When my new machine arrived I upgraded to VHDX as that would support TRIM. I was preparing my machine for a SSD upgrade, waiting for the right time. And that was 15 minutes ago 😉

Together with the SSD I ordered a USB 3.0 case for my soon to be old drive. Wise choice as the speed improvement is huge, like adding SSD to your laptop.

First I popped the bottom of my HP Probook and unscrewed the HDD, then added the SSD and put the HDD in the usb case.

Making sure I’ve plugged the HDD case in a USB 3.0 port, I booted from an Windows 8 installation USB and headed to the command prompt. (Repair your computer > Troubleshoot > Advanced options > Command Prompt) Then started the DISKPART fun.

DISKPART
SELECT DISK 0
CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
FORMAT QUICK FS=ntfs LABEL=harddrive
ASSIGN LETTER=c
EXIT

Copy the VHDX to the c-drive. My 40Gb file only took 8 minutes!

DISKPART
SELECT VDISK FILE=c:\win8.vhdx
ATTACH VDISK
LIST VOLUME
SELECT VOLUME <vol_nr_of_vhdx>
ASSIGN LETTER=v
EXIT

cd v:\windows\system32
bcdboot v:\windows /s c:

DONE. Stop the time.