I spent the first 3 weeks of my "Windows 7 Out of the Box Experience" trying to get GUID Partition Tables / UEFI working. There are no "Logical Volumes" in GPT.
Could you explain main advantages of
GUID Partitioning Scheme?
MBR based partitioning remains prevalent in Windows world, for which
VHD Director seems currently being developed, but it may gradually change overtime, unless you target portable EFI devices now.
We can safely set the limit of 3
Primary and 4
Logical partitions in one
Extended to depict fully (not symbolically), as most users wouldn't reach that target in Windows systems. Would be also nice to differentiate a
Basic Volume from
Dynamic. Of course,
Disk Partitioning offers a broader variety, but this indeed might wait for a next release.
OR, it might be enough to just highlight
Bootable Volumes on a VHD, marking each with OS logo, without details on partition type.
While I can certainly check the largest available chunk of free space on the drive, I'm not sure I can guarantee that a new VHD will end up there.
It will, at least in current NTFS. But
VHD Director may suggest whether defrag is required and space is sufficient to place a target extra VHD on the drive. For that to happen, a depiction of current state (several VHDs on the drive & the drive overall fragmentation pic) would help, also highlighting non-contiguous VHDs. I can try to draw that, but don't expect my painting skills be close to yours.
My assumption also is, most users would place several VHDs on an empty Volume or a dedicated to service or other tasks removable & networked HD, so there wouldn't be other large files present on it. Even if they are, for the purpose of adding an extra VHD to the drive its enough to show how many VHDs are currently stored on it (while disregarding other files), highlight non-contiguous, and depict HD fragmentation level like above.
Did they block it in the operating system, or in the VHDMount (Virtual Server) updates?
It was purposely blocked on OS side based on the above Tutorial, but installable by following it. Current
Win7 & Server 2008R2 VHD drivers are also dated back to 2006, while updated to present OS version. This probably means, one set was acquired with
Virtual PC, and another developed in-house, or such... Consider using MS drivers supporting Native Boot if possible instead of
VHDMount drivers, because they are present in Win7, and can possibly be ported to WinXP, thus enabling its native boot from VHD (just dreaming). But again, it may be the task for a (distant) future release.