Native Boot A VHD, from not working to working

To remedy this issue with my VM performance in my previous post.  My coworker suggested i take a look at scott hanselmans blog at the Booting from a VHD post. This was a great post and I never had any idea that this was even possible. So i converted my vmdx(or whatever the vmware hd format is) back to a vhd and then went to making the changes to the boot partation using bdedit that were suggested…..

c:\> bcdedit /copy {current} /d “myVHD”

Copy the CSLID that is displayed and then run…

c:\> bcdedit /set {CLSID} device vhd=[C:]\vhds\vhdname.vhd

c:\> bcdedit /set {CLSID} osdevice vhd=[C:]\vhds\vhdname.vhd

c:\> bcdedit /set {CLSID} detecthal on

This didnt work, but upon further looking i found this. It used the bdboot command instead.I ran this command and then it booted right up into my server 2012 vhd.

I must add that i used the disk managment tool to attach the vhd in my 32bit host first and i gave it a drive letter of p. Then i ran the bcdboot (driveletter:\windows) command and it worked.

ex.
bcdboot p:\windows

This created the boot entry and did all the setup that was needed. I restarted the computer and booted from the new entry.

Dont forget to backup your boot partition first.

Backup:
bcdedit /export c:\BACKUPBCD

Restore:
bcdedit /import c:\BACKUPBCD