Windows boot from virtual hard disk

Office Office Exchange Server. Not an IT pro? United States English. Post an article. Subscribe to Article RSS. Click Sign In to add the tip, solution, correction or comment that will help other users. This enables greater flexibility in workload distribution because a single set of tools can be used to manage images for virtual machines and designated hardware. Create a partition for the Windows files, format it, and assign it a drive letter. This drive letter will appear in File Explorer.

Copy the VHDX to a network share or removable storage drive. Clean and prepare the destination PC's hard drive. Connect to the network drive or storage location where you copied the VHDX in step 3.

Identify the attached VHDX's volume letter. Optional: Change it to another letter that makes more sense, for example V, and leave the diskpart command line open for the next step. If there's only one boot entry, the device immediately boots to Windows. Privacy policy. Native boot enables virtual hard disks VHDXs to run on a computer without a virtual machine or hypervisor.

A hypervisor is a layer of software under the operating system that runs virtual machines. Native boot is a virtual hard disk running an operating system on designated hardware without any other parent operating system, virtual machine, or hypervisor:. Native-boot VHDXs are not designed or intended to replace full image deployment on all client or server systems. Enterprise environments already managing and using.

Using the. Maintaining and deploying a common reference VHDX image to execute in either virtual or physical computers. Configuring a computer to boot multiple local VHDX files that contain different application workloads, without requiring separate disk partitions.

Using the same image-management tools for creating, deploying, and maintaining system images to be installed on designated hardware or on a virtual machine. Deploying an image on a virtual machine or a designated computer, depending on capacity planning and availability. Deploying supported Windows images in a VHDX container file for faster deployment of reusable development and testing environments. An attached VHDX can't be a dynamic disk. A dynamic disk provides features that basic disks do not, such as the ability to create volumes that span multiple disks spanned and striped volumes , and the ability to create fault-tolerant volumes mirrored and RAID-5 volumes.