Boot from VHD

[tannerrissinger]

Possible stupid question time. I was planing on dual booting W8.1 alongside W10 for reasons. I read something about installing the secondary OS to a virtual disk and booting from that, then I started wondering if you could boot from a VHD and also access it from virtualbox. If this is possible, would this mean I can access W8.1 from the boot menu and also from virtualbox in W10?

 

[Alabalcho]

In the past, there was a way to boot Ubuntu this way, Linux kernel took care of installing an NTFS driver below the VHD, and fool Ubuntu it's running on real hard drive. I know of no such thing under Windwos.

And even if it was possible, that Windows setup inside the VHD would meet two (vastly) different hardware platforms...

 

[USAFRet]

Possible stupid question time. I was planing on dual booting W8.1 alongside W10 for reasons. I read something about installing the secondary OS to a virtual disk and booting from that, then I started wondering if you could boot from a VHD and also access it from virtualbox. If this is possible, would this mean I can access W8.1 from the boot menu and also from virtualbox in W10?

Possibly here:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToGuideToInstallingAndBootingWindows8ConsumerPreviewOffAVHDVirtualHardDisk.aspx

But...
If you want to choose which OS at boot time, just install each on its own partition or drive.
If you want to run both OS's at the same time (usual VM situation), don't worry about trying to start it up at boot time.

 

[tannerrissinger]

In the past, there was a way to boot Ubuntu this way, Linux kernel took care of installing an NTFS driver below the VHD, and fool Ubuntu it's running on real hard drive. I know of no such thing under Windwos.

And even if it was possible, that Windows setup inside the VHD would meet two (vastly) different hardware platforms...

I figured out how to do it. Even if it is completely useless i was fully committed to figuring it out. I created a VHD from the windows disk manager, then started virtualbox and selected the existing VHD when making a W8.1 VM, I then added the W8.1 ISO, i installed 8.1 to the VHD through virtualbox. Then i mounted the VHD, and in the command line I put bcdboot F:\windows /p /d to add boot files to it. Now I can access W8.1 at startup and also through virtualbox in W10.

 

[tannerrissinger]

Possible stupid question time. I was planing on dual booting W8.1 alongside W10 for reasons. I read something about installing the secondary OS to a virtual disk and booting from that, then I started wondering if you could boot from a VHD and also access it from virtualbox. If this is possible, would this mean I can access W8.1 from the boot menu and also from virtualbox in W10?

Possibly here:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToGuideToInstallingAndBootingWindows8ConsumerPreviewOffAVHDVirtualHardDisk.aspx

But...
If you want to choose which OS at boot time, just install each on its own partition or drive.
If you want to run both OS's at the same time (usual VM situation), don't worry about trying to start it up at boot time.

I can do both now.