Ventoy and Windows 11 VHD

[nicolasnobelis]

Hello,

I would like to create a portable installation of Windows 11 on a USB stick.

I followed various tutorials (in particular https://www.ventoy.net/en/plugin_vhdboot.html) but I am running into problems.

What I did:

• I created a VHD disk image with VirtualBox. I installed Windows 11 on it and restarted the Virtual machine several times
• I formatted a USB stick to NTFS
• with VentoyGUI.x86_64, I installed Ventoy with GPT and Secure Boot enabled
  
• the USB stick now has 2 partitions:

Device        Start      End  Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sda1      2048 59998167 59996120 28,6G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda2  59998168 60063703    65536   32M Microsoft basic data

• in sda1, I copy the VHD to the root: Windows 11.vhd. The MD5 checksums (after remounting the USB stick) match.
• Then I created a folder ventoy with:
  • ventoy_vhdboot.img taken from https://github.com/ventoy/vhdiso/releases/download/v3.0/ventoy_vhdboot.zip (I chose Win10Based)
  • a ventoy_grub.cfg containing:

menuentry "Boot My Windows VHD" {    
    set my_vhd_path="Windows 11.vhd"
    
    if search -n -s vdiskhd -f "$my_vhd_path"; then
        vhdboot_common_func "($vdiskhd)$my_vhd_path"
    else
        echo "$my_vhd_path not found"
    fi
}

Now my motherboard has "secure boot" disabled and set to run in "legacy OS" mode.

I boot from the USB stick in UEFI mode and Ventoy starts (I see UEFI written bottom left).
I can select Boot My Windows VHD but then I get a Windows error:

Has anyone an idea what is happening ?
Does Ventoy support Windows11 or only Windows10 ?

[steve6375]

Did you boot the VM in UEFI mode and install windows in UEFI mode?

Did you try just booting from the Ventoy menu?

[nicolasnobelis]

Did you boot the VM in UEFI mode and install windows in UEFI mode?

^ these are the settings I used in VirtualBox so I guess yes ?

Did you try just booting from the Ventoy menu?

I tried to select the VHD file in the Ventoy file browser, same error.

[nicolasnobelis]

Exact same steps as above but with Windows 10 work without problem.