How to Solve Hyper-V Not Booting from VHDX [3 Ways]

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
• Hyper-V disk2vhd boot failure

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 do 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 cannot not boot 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 machines

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

For Generation 1 VMs, ensure the VHDX uses MBR (Master Boot Record). For Generation 2 VMs, it should use GPT (GUID Partition Table). If the VHDX is in the wrong format, you may need to convert the disk or create a new VM with the correct settings.

As it warns you when creating a virtual machine: you cannot change a VM’s generation once you’ve created the VM. So sometimes you'll find that Hyper-V cannot convert Gen 1 to Gen 2 or vice versa, and vice versa, so you'll have to recreate a new Gen 1 VM.

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.

If the VHDX is in the wrong format, you may need to convert the disk or create a new VM with the correct settings to solve the Hyper-V boot failure.

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 Cyber Backup.

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 Cyber Backup, and navigate to Agent > Download Agent to download the installation file to your local computer, and then copy it to the corresponding device for installation.

2. Click Backup Task > Create New Task to open the task creating page.

• Select File Backup from backup type. It’s also available for SQL database backup and centralized disk/partition/system backup.

• Enter a Task Name and choose the specific files or folders you wish to back up in Backup Content. This selective process ensures only essential data is backed up.

• Select Target to save backups to local or network share. You can also easily archive files to Amazon S3.
• Configure Schedule, and select backup frequency as daily, weekly, or monthly according to your needs. This feature ensures that your backups are always up-to-date, providing peace of mind.
• Set Backup Cleanup to automatically delete old file backups without worrying about backup failure due to disk space being full.
• Click Start Backup.

3. The created task will be listed separately. Click Restore on the right top of the task and configure recovery task.

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.