Windows 8 In Depth

Booting a VHD File on Hardware

If you have Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise, or Windows 8 Professional or Enterprise, your computer can physically boot and run a copy of either of these operating systems stored in a VHD virtual disk file. You can take advantage of this to physically boot a Windows 8 or 7 virtual machine on real hardware. We’d recommend making a backup copy of the VHD file before you try this.

To set up a new boot option, you can use a third-party GUI boot manager tool such as EasyBCD (www.neosmart.net), or you can use the BCDEDIT command-line tool provided with Windows. Follow these steps:

1. Open an elevated Command Prompt window. To do this on Windows 8, press Windows Logo+X and then select Command Prompt (Admin).

2. Type ...