Walkthrough: Deploy a Virtual Hard Disk for Native Boot

Source

Published: October 22, 2009

Updated: July 8, 2010

Applies To: Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2

This walkthrough describes how to create and configure a virtual hard disk (VHD) running Windows® 7 for native boot. A native-boot VHD is a virtual hard disk that can be used as the running operating system on designated hardware without any other parent operating system. This is in contrast to a scenario where a VHD is connected to a virtual machine on a computer with a parent operating system.

In this release, VHDs can be applied to computers that have no other installations of Windows, for usage as a native-boot VHD, without a virtual machine or hypervisor. (A hypervisor is a layer of software below the operating system that runs virtual computers.) This allows for greater flexibility in workload distribution in that a single set of tools can be used to manage images for virtual machines and designated hardware.

Note
This walkthrough describes how to deploy the VHD to a computer with no other installations of Windows. For more information about deploying multiple VHDs with native-boot on a single computer, or deploying VHDs on computers with a parent operating system, see Add a Native-Boot Virtual Hard Disk to the Boot Menu.

Prerequisites