Boot from VHD in Win7

Posted By: Adam Bomb | Feb 20th @ 12:01 AM | 38,103 Views | 16 Comments

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Windows 7 has a new feature that makes it easier than ever to set up multi-boot scenarios on a single machine.
Boot from VHD allows you to mount a vhd as a bootable drive and, as the name implies, boot from it. It's a great scenario for creating multiple OS installations without having to create multiple OS partitions on your hard drive.
I recently sat down with Jeremy Chapman, who took time to explain and demo this feature and some of the other new drive partition features of Windows 7.

Tags: Top 10, Windows 7

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RickyF

Nice announcement but....

Where does one learn how to access and use these tools? Please provide more information than just this announcement of features.

Yanze

Ricky, maybe this helps to get you starting:

http://www.buit.org/2009/02/09/native-vhd-in-windows-7/

csolarz

Does it matter what creates the .VHD files? does it have to be Hyper-V 1 or 2.0? can it use or mount virtual server or virutal PC generated VHD's?

Yanze

No, it doesn't matter whether you create it with 1.0 or 2.0, a VHD is a VHD.

It should be possible to boot from Virtual PC/Server generated VHD's, but I didn't get that to work. I've read somewhere that you should sysprep the VM-VHD before using it as a boot-VHD (didn't try it though)

tt09

Nice feature! Does the installed OS in VHD need to be Windows 7 also? Or any OS is supported?

Yanze

At the moment you can do this with Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2.

ZippyV
Fired Up

In reply to Yanze

#Feb 22nd @ 11:24 AM

Are there any plans to support older versions of Windows like XP as a boot from VHD?

Yanze

In reply to ZippyV

#Feb 27th @ 3:19 AM

I have no idea Zippy, but that would be really cool wouldn't it?!

TDowns

Love the concept of making it easy to boot into mutliple OS. I keep a clean VHD around for development purposes so I can just boot into that run my install scripts and test that everything is working ok. Also we have alot of demo images around that we are always booting into at startup.

Are there any plans to boot the VHD inside the same machine. There are alot of us who use the workstation version of the VMBadGuys in order to keep our development enviroments seperate.