There is strong tendency to move towards virtualized environments which offer greater flexibility and economy of scale. VHDs are especially attractive lately due to their Native Boot support in Win 7, almost eliminating performance and/or PC resources hit usually associated with using VMs. For some ideas on using VHDs see for example How to use Differencing Disks for your Advantage.
The problem however is, not many Boor Managers are able to boot directly from VHDs by using VHD's own BCD and boot loader instead of main HD partition placed Win 7 BCD and Bootmgr. This restricts VHD disks mobility, requiring Win 7 install on each PC where VHD boot plus Generalizing the VHDs before moving to another PC with different hardware. Further, its not ordinary possible to boot a Native Boot VHD inside a Hyper-V VM (which is part of Windows Server 2008R2 and oncoming Windows 8) without generalizing it first. Meanwhile, VMWare allows to boot without a problem OS from physical HDs used as primary drives on the same PC. Even more problems exist with booting VHDs based on OS other than certain Win 7 versions.
I read the VHD Loader thread on PLOP forum, and the development looks very promising. It appears, working on this app gives genuine relief and pleasure to its author that by itself guarantees progress and success.
![:)](http://reboot.pro/public/style_emoticons/default/smile.png)
I'm going to test VHD Loader more, but even after reading the thread, a few suggestions for further development:
- Make VHD Loader part of Plop Boot Manager
- Boot VHDs of fixed, dynamic and differencing types
- Boot VHDs without Win7 present on the main HD by using BCD and Bootmgr inside the VHD
- Boot VHDs saved on NTSF instead of FAT32 formatted partition
- Boot VHDs with Win XP installed inside them instead of Win7 Ultimate (almost only OS able to boot VHDs natively)
- Boot on the same or different PC the VHDs prepared inside a VM (such as Hyper-V), without generalizing them each time, when moving btw Win and the Hyper-V
- Add support for booting VMDK drives, used by VMWare
Good luck Elmar with this excellent project!
![:good:](http://reboot.pro/public/style_emoticons/default/good.gif)