Boot From VHD: Change the target VHD

There is a whole tutorial that could be written about booting from a VHD in Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2. This is not that tutorial, and I am probably not the one to write it. But I did want to make a note of this because I know that I’ll forget it the next time I need it.

To change the VHD that you’re booting from, you just have to make a couple of changes to the BCD. Boot from a Windows PE disc or a Windows 7 disc in System Recovery, and get to a command prompt. Then you enter these two commands. Notice that they’re almost exactly the same.

bcdedit /set {default} device vhd=[C:]\myvhd.vhd
bcdedit /set {default} osdevice vhd=[C:]\myvhd.vhd

Obviously you’ll replace myvhd.vhd with the VHD you want to boot from.