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How to Solve Hyper-V Not Booting from VHDX [3 Ways]
Have you ever encountered the problem Hyper-V not booting from VHDX? Do you know what causes it and how to fix it? Here I summarized 3 ways to solve it in this article.
By Crystal / Updated on July 15, 2022
Why Hyper-V not booting from VHDX
You may encounter many problems when using Hyper-V, for example, Hyper-V VM failed to change state, or Hype-V not booting from VHDX. For the former problem, you can click on the anchor text to jump to the page where I introduced the solutions. As for the latter one, there may be many reasons leading to it. Such as:
- The generation of this Hyper-V virtual machine does not match the boot method.
- Your VHDX is improperly converted from physical disks.
- …
In fact, while VHDX is a virtual hard disk format, it is not particular to Hyper-V. For example, you can create VHDX files from physical Windows 10 disks via Disk2vhd. However, manual creating of UEFI boot partition will be needed in this way. Otherwise, you may encounter the problem Hyper-V Disk2vhd boot failure.
Therefore, if you want to perform Hyper-V physical to virtual conversion, it is recommended that you done it via file-based backup and restore. I will introduce it after 2 other easier solutions to this problem in this article.
How to fix Hyper-V not booting from VHDX
In this part, I will introduce 3 ways to solve the Hyper-V cannot boot VHDX problem. If the generation of your Hyper-V VM does not match the boot method, you can change it by the first 2 ways. And if there are problems converting a physical disk to VHDX, you can try the third way to perform it more safely.
Disable Secure Boot for generation 2 virtual machine
1. Launch Hyper-V Manager, right-click on the name of the target virtual machine and select Settings.
2. Navigate to Hardware > Security from the left inventory, uncheck the Enable Secure Boot option.
✦ Tip:
1. To check the generation of a Hyper-V VM, you just need to click on the virtual machine name and the generation and other information of this VM are at the bottom VM summary.
2. If you prefer using Windows PowerShell to disable Secure Boot, the command is:
Set-VMFirmware -VMName “VMName” -DisableSecureBoot
Create a new generation 1 virtual machine
The reason why you need to create a new generation 1 virtual machine is that Hyper-V cannot convert generation 1 to generation 2 or vice versa, just as it warned you at the creation: you cannot change a VM’s generation once you’ve created the VM. And Microsoft doesn’t provide any tools for converting VMs from one generation to another, since they are so different.
Here are the steps:
1. Launch Hyper-V Manager, click Action > New >Virtual Machine… to open a wizard. Click Next to continue.
2. Specify a Name for the virtual machine. And by checking Store the virtual machine in a different location option you can change the default storage. Click Next.
3. Specify the generation of the new virtual machine as Generation 1.
And then click Next and follow the rest steps to create the new generation 1 Hyper-V virtual machine.
Perform P2V via file-based backup and restore
If your Hyper-V not booting from VHDX after it is created from a physical disk, it may because you performed the P2V operation improperly. Actually in this regard, backup everything on the physical disk and restore it to the virtual machine is a safe, effective, and affordable solution.
Therefore, here I will introduce you an effective and affordable file-based backup software: AOMEI Centralized Backupper.
By installing the backup agent on your virtual machine, you can backup and restore files on your virtual machine as it is a physical machine.
Next, I will show you how to perform P2V safely via file-based backup and restore. You can click the following button to start a free trial.
1. Launch AOMEI Centralized Backupper, and navigate to Computers > Uncontrolled Computers. Check both the physical and virtual machines (with static IP) you want to backup and restore from the Computers list, and click Request Control.
It will pop up a request window on both of the machines, once authorized you can back up whenever you like without repeat this step again.
2. Navigate to Tasks > New Task > Disk Backup.
2. Click + Add Computers to specify physical machine you want to backup. Click OK to confirm.
3. Click Step 2 to specify the data you want to backup. You can select All disks, Disks containing system partitions, Disks containing partitions with specified drive letters, or Disks containing partitions with matching labels.
4. Click Step 3 to specify a Share or NAS device to store the backup, and then click Start Backup.
5. The created task will be listed separately in Tasks. Click Advanced > Restore on the right top of the task.
6. Specify the backup file as the restore source, select Restore the whole disk, or Restore a partition of the disk, and click Next.
7. Select Restore to another computer option, and specify the virtual machine and a destination disk to restore to, click Next.
8. Review the Disk Restore Operation Summary. You can also Edit Disk or Align partition to optimize for SSD in this step. Then click Start Restore.
Summary
If your Hyper-V not booting from VHDX, it probably because the generation of the VM does not match the boot method, or you have problems converting your physical disk to virtual disks.
In this article, I introduced 3 ways to solve Hyper-V not booting from VHDX. Hope it could help you.
And if you want a more secure way to perform P2V conversion, no matter on Hyper-V or VMware, file-based backup and restore is always an easy and economical way.
