Windows 8.1 hyper-v does not support Windows 7 as a Guest OS with a Gen 2 VM

I was stuck on this since last week.


Q: Why don’t we support 64-bit Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 as a guest operating system in generation 2 virtual machines?

A: Certainly it is true that Windows 7 support UEFI, the first requirement for generation 2 virtual machines. However, Windows 7 has a hardware dependency on a Programmable Interrupt Controller (PIC) which is not present in generation 2 virtual machines. Even if Secure Boot is disabled, an attempt to install Windows 7 will result in an apparent hang at “Starting Windows” shortly after boot, consuming 100% VP utilisation. A similar effect to this will be seen if attempting a network install from a WDS server which has a Windows 7 era boot PE image – network boot will appear to hang as well. For that reason (along with the keyboard issue in Windows 8 PE) I strongly recommend any WDS server are upgraded to the Windows 8.1 PE boot image.

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