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I'm moving to Windows 10 but I need to keep my old Windows 7 installation usable via Hyper-V host.

I tried connecting a virtual machine to the old Win7 disk but I got a 0x7B STOP error (inaccessible boot device), indicating the Win7 installation doesn't have the right drivers installed for the change to a virtual machine.

I've Googled it to death but can't find a clear "how to prepare an existing Win7 OS for P2V" type solution (most discuss how to prepare clean images). Any suggestions on how to amend the Win7 installation so it will work under Win10-HyperV ?

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Finally found a useful article, and managed to fix the various problems so I'll document them here for others.

My machine had a 500GB SSD with Windows 7 Pro installed. Installed a new 1TB SSD as the primary disk and installed Windows 10 Pro. Added the Hyper-V client, and then converted the old SSD disk to a .VHD file.

Problem

When I tried to run the VHD as a virtual client PC under Win10 Hyper-V, I got a blue screen with a STOP 0x0000007b (inaccessible boot device) error. This would flick off after a second and the virtual machine would reboot. This is normally caused by driver issues (since the P2V move means the hardware has changed).

Solution

I finally found a TechNet article archive.org about this problem, which advises checking for three driver files and resetting some registry entries.

  1. I mounted the VHD in Win10, and verified the driver files existed (they did)
  2. I mounted the registry of the Win7 VHD and fixed the registry entries in the article (I did them all since I could recreate the VHD if it died).
  3. Dismounted the registry, then the VHD
  4. Restarted the virtual machine

More Errors

This time we got a different error - it failed to boot saying

File: \Windows\System32\winload.exe
Status: 0xc0000002
Info: The selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt.

I tried following this article: How to fix winload.exe is missing or corrupt issue on Windows 7 startup? - this involves mounting the Win7 DVD and booting to this, but this didn't work.

However, the repair option was stating that it could see errors and correct them. Letting the repair option do it's thing worked and I could now boot the Win7 OS as a virtual machine. Hurrah!

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