Booting Hyper-V R2 off a USB stick

A while ago we announced that Microsoft Hyper-V Server R2 would support booting off of a USB flash device.  We have now provided detailed documentation on how to set this up.  Even cooler than booting Hyper-V off of a USB device – is the fact that what we are doing is booting a VHD with Hyper-V installed on it off of a USB device:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee731893(WS.10).aspx

If you are like me – you will probably think: “Cool! I have to check that out!” And then after looking over that page you will think: “Eh, that seems like a lot of work…”

Thankfully Paul Despe has made a little tool that makes this dead simple.  You can grab it from here:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/BootHVSR2FromUSB

With this tool all you have to do is:

1. Install the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK)
2. Grab Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and either burn it to a DVD or mount it with a virtual CD program
3. Connect your USB flash device
4. Run the tool As Administrator
5. Select your USB flash device as your target disk
   1. Warning! You can select any disk in your system – and it will get formatted.  Make sure you are selecting your USB flash disk – and you do not have any data on the disk that you want to keep.
6. Click on the Create Blank VHD button and choose a temporary location for the VHD
7. Locate your copy of the INSTALL.WIM file from the Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
8. Hit the Start button and wait a short time (~30 minutes on my system) for everything to be setup

The rest is on :

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2009/11/18/booting-hyper-v-r2-off-a-usb-stick.aspx