Skip to main content

VBoot: Boot Physical Computer From Virtual Disks

Windows 7 has a useful feature called “VHD Boot” that lets you boot your entire Windows out of a Virtual Hard Disk file, as those used with Virtual PC or VMware. The machine is booted physically from this VHD file which is mounted as a virtual disk but used as a normal hard disk drive allowing you to install programs, create and save new files.

VBoot is a new software – a boot manager – from the makers of VMLite (which we wrote about earlier), that brings VHD booting capability to operating systems earlier than Windows 7 and even extending it to Linux. VBoot is, in fact, based on Grub, so that isn’t a surprise.

vboot-snapshots

VBoot allows you to boot a physical computer from a single virtual disk file in VHD/VMDK/VDI/Raw format. It supports Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, 2003 Server, 2008 Server and Linux 2.6, 32- and 64-bit. Thus, using VBoot, you can natively boot any of the operating systems mentioned above from their VHD (or VMDK/VDI/Raw) file.

The VHD file can be created using a virtualization software like VMware or Virtual PC. VBoot also includes a tool that lets you create an empty VHD disk and then install the desired operating system into the VHD file from an ISO image or a CD. Existing VHD files must first be prepared for VBoot by running another tool, also included with the software.

VBoot can be chainloaded to your existing Windows boot manager, which keeps all of your Windows boot entries, and VBoot appears as an extra boot entry from the Windows boot manager, or installed directly to the hard disk replacing the Windows Boot Manager. Either way, you get VHD boot support. VBoot is also an excellent multi-boot manager.

VBoot also supports differencing disks which lets you recover to a prior state, or make the session immutable where all system changes will be discarded after reboot, and thus making it ideal to deal with any computer virus or spyware.

Full instructions on how to install and use VBoot are provided on their website.

Related:
Automated physical-to-virtual migration tool for Windows 7
Disk2vhd converts physical disk into virtual disk

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Record CPU and Memory Usage Over Time in Windows?

Whenever the computer is lagging or some application is taking too long to respond, we usually fire up task manager and look under the Performance tab or under Processes to check on processor utilization or the amount of free memory available. The task manager is ideal for real-time analysis of CPU and memory utilization. It even displays a short history of CPU utilization in the form of a graph. You get a small time-window, about 30 seconds or so, depending on how large the viewing area is.
17 comments
Read more

Diagram 101: Different Types of Diagrams and When To Use Them

Diagrams are a great way to visualize information and convey meaning. The problem is that there’s too many different types of diagrams, so it can be hard to know which ones you should use in any given situation. To help you out, we’ve created this diagram that lays out the 7 most common types of diagrams and when they’re best used:
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Schedule Changes to Your Facebook Page Cover Photo

Facebook’s current layout, the so called Timeline, features a prominent, large cover photo that some people are using in a lot of different creative ways. Timeline is also available for Facebook Pages that people can use to promote their website or business or event. Although you can change the cover photo as often as you like, it’s meant to be static – something which you design and leave it for at least a few weeks or months like a redesigned website. However, there are times when you may want to change the cover photo frequently and periodically to match event dates or some special promotion that you are running or plan to run. So, here is how you can do that.
1 comment
Read more