I spent good part of yesterday trying to natively boot a PC with a Vista VHD. I am impressed with the native VHD boot of Win7. Both experimenting and testing benefit from it. The ability to refresh a machine in around 5 minutes without using any tools is truly amazing. Yes, virtual machine snapshots do it even faster, but you lose a good part of the machines power when using a virtual machine. Specially if you use it for a prolong period, native boot has advantages.
Yesterday I wanted to try natively booting a system from a Vista VHD. There were several posts in the net how you go around doing it, and they seems to be so simple and did not understand why MS does not support it. Step by step instructions I saw is identical to what you do when getting a Win7 VHD to boot natively.
To tell a long story short, it didn't work. At boot up, Windows goes to recovery mode if I have an boot entry to Vista VHD. Surfing the net a bit proved that I'm not alone in that.
After half a day later, my hopes were shattering. There are couple of posts explaining why it can't be done. Well, every thing ever been done on this planet has been put away by someone saying it's not possible. So those posts didn't stop me trying it. However, now I believe it is not possible - at least in the way described in some sites (just adding the VHD to boot menu) but may be there is another way - I will keep trying.
I came across the product VMLight when searching for this. It seems they have a driver that can natively boot any VHD (not only Vista but XP, Linux too). I will try it but I'm not sure if it is really 'native'. Though you boot from a VHD, it is probably using another layer to translate VHD to a SCSI device. This could affect performance but the flexibility you get with the ability to natively boot all current OSs could well worth it.
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