Whenever I first starting trying to figure out how to create a bootable VHD image and boot into it, I received plenty of links from people but it just seemed that no matter which link or advice I would follow, there was always something that just wouldn’t quite work with my specific hardware. Of course, if anyone is ever going to have hardware issues, it always seems to be me! What I finally came upon was a list of steps, a combination of instructions from various other sources that seem to work every time, no matter what (at least for my hardware). A couple of customers requested that I post these steps, so here we go. If you already have a procedure that works for you, that’s fine, this is just for those that need a concise list of steps. The first thing to know is, to boot into an OS as a bootable VHD image, the OS needs to be either Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. And of course you need to setup your hardware BIOS to allow for hardware virtualization. From there… 1. Starting from scratch, what you will need to do is build a .vhd image that has an OS installed on it, but yet has not had the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) associated with it for the machine you are building it on. I will use a tool called Wim2Vhd. This is a command line tool used to extract image information from the OS image on disk and add it to the vhd. You can find more information about this tool here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wim2vhd. 2. Since I have an MSDN subscription , I decided to pull down an image (.iso) from there and then I extracted this .iso image onto a DVD. Make sure you get your product key because you will need that to activate Windows once you get booted into the new OS. Read more: NCDevGuys' ramblings on connected bits....