I recently got a new replacement work laptop with Windows 7 installed. Despite the great desire to shrink it and put a more mature and stable OS on to use, I decided to give Win 7 a shot – that and I needed to use the laptop right away so I didn’t have an immediate choice.

Well after a month of use, Windows 7 was already showing the signs that it was going the way of its predecessors in growing exponentially, slow boots and sloooow shutdowns… I heard Ubuntu calling.

You see, Linux takes a while to get used to when you come from a Windows background, things aren’t done the same way, but after time you realise this new way of doing things makes much more sense and takes much less time. So when you go back to Windows after a few years in Linux, you feel like you’re taking a step back in time – to slower, less advanced OS, where a problem can’t be fixed unless you are prepared to fork out a lot of money for a proprietary app that you’re only ever going to need to use to solve that one problem.

It was time to stop the rot and cage Windows 7, I still needed it for Outlook and Exchange (well until Crossover can support 2010) but I don’t need 90% of that operating system. I had done plenty of duel boots before but I wanted to try my hand at turning my Win 7 partition into a VM, and despite the ubiquity of home-brew tutorials out there on the web, I had to turn to several for different problems I experienced along the way. I’m documenting the steps here completely, and will provide attribute the relevant tutorials that helped.

Step 0: Backup

It needs to be said, it needs to be done. I always hate using Windows Backup and sometimes opt to use a Linux live CD to do the backup instead, guaranteeing I can view the process. I usually just make sure that documents are saved, I’m not worried about settings as these can be reset. This time I used Windows backup to an external HDD which seemed to work adequately enough.

Step 1: Shrink Windows 7 Partition

Although it’s not recommended, I always found GParted to be a trouble-free tool and never had a problem with it, so I booted into an Ubuntu Live CD and fired it up. I was then presented with a disk that had no less than 4 partitions. One was a boot partition, one was recovery, the other I couldn’t tell, and the final one was Windows 7. Here is where I made my first mistake, I got cocky and deleted the Windows boot partition thinking I could restore the boot record later with a recovery disk – it seems Microsoft have made that process much less efficient along with making partitions a lot more complicated than necessary.

Anyway, don’t delete the boot partition, but if you do, then here’s what to do:

The first problem I had was that Windows 7 wouldn’t boot I had the following error:

“autochk program not found, skipping autocheck”

Some Googling brought me to a Microsoft Answers post.

• Use your recovery CD or download one if you got a crappy OEM pre-installed system – Neosmart have some links and instructions for torrent files.
• Boot into recovery and then when you get to the System Recovery Options screen, you can choose the automatic System Repair option but I’ve never found it any use so go straight to Command Prompt.
• Run the following command to check your disk for errors and fix them (where x: is the drive containing your Win 7 install):

CHKDSK x: /F /R

• Once that runs restart the computer.

In my case chkdsk didn’t work and I still got the error, so the next thing I attempted was to attempt to use bootrec to fix the mbr.

• Boot back into System Restore, go to the command prompt and run:

bootrec /fixmbr

then
bootrec /fixboot

then
bootrec /rebuildbcd

In my case after the last command I got the following error:

“total identified windows installations 0”

Exporting the bcd didn’t work either:

bcdedit /export C:\BCD_Backup
c:
cd boot
attrib bcd -s -h -r
ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
bootrec /RebuildBcd

So I attempted the following fix to this following the instructions from Neosmart again, Recovering the Bootloader:

x:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt60 all /force
del C:\boot\bcd
bcdedit /createstore c:\boot\bcd.temp
bcdedit.exe /store c:\boot\bcd.temp /create {bootmgr} /d "Windows Boot Manager"
bcdedit.exe /import c:\boot\bcd.temp
bcdedit.exe /set {bootmgr} device partition=C:
bcdedit.exe /timeout 10
del c:\boot\bcd.temp

But I didn’t get that far because I didn’t have a bootsect file, so I had to do a bit more digging and found a better solution halfway down this thread. These are just the steps, but more detail about why we do this is in the original post.

First of all I seemed to have some kind of corruption in my filesystem telling me that the c:\boot\bcd file didn’t exist, except it was there, when I attempted to copy memtest.ext to BCD it said that a file already existed. This is where the Live CD came to the rescue:

• Boot into Linux live cd.
• Mount your Windows 7 partition.
• Navigate to /Boot
• Delete the ‘BCD’ file.
• After a startup repair your original BCD file is renamed to BCD.Backup.0001.
• Copy memtest.exe memtest.exe.org.
• Copy BCD.Backup.0001 memtest.exe.
• Rename memtest.exe to BCD.
• Rename memtest.exe.org memtest.exe.
• Now reboot Windows.

In my case, this solution finally worked and I got Windows working again. Now for virtualisation…

Step 2: Virtualising Windows 7 Partition as a VM

I followed instructions given by Rajat Arya on his blog, apart from the 5th step which didn’t work without some slight modification as I had installed VirtualBox v4.0.4 from http://www.virtualbox.org/, not the Open Source Edition.

These are just the steps, Rajat goes into more detail in the post which is worth reading:

You need to take ownership of the disk first under your username. The original way stated is to chmod the /dev/sda file but this is less secure.
sudo usermod -a -G disk wafitz
Then log out and back in to make the changes take effect. Next install the mbr package:
sudo apt-get install mbr
The -e flag below is to set the partitions you wish to make available to Windows boot, so in this case I set 1 (Windows partition) and 2 (recovery).
install-mbr -e12 --force ~/vm.mbr
Then create the vmdk file. I found that the -relative flag didn’t work, neither did the -mbr flag, but it was fine with these left out:
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /home/wafitz/wind7part.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda -partitions 1,2 -relative
Now create your VM in VirtualBox and boot into Windows 7. If you get a boot error, you’ll need to do Windows recovery again. Set the VM to mount your CD drive then press F12 at startup and boot into recovery… and follow through on Step 1 of this post again.

Now I installed VirtualBox tools and with Seamless mode, I’m able to Outlook as a full-on desktop app within Ubuntu.