Multi Boot into Windows 8 from VHD on Windows 7

Windows 8 is upon us, well at the time of writing Windows Developer Preview is available as a pre beta download.

I have written before on multi booting into VHD images in Windows 7 and so I wanted to see whether it is possible to multiboot into a Windows 8 VHD image from my Windows 7 desktop.

The short answer is no it doesn’t work, or at least not in the way I approached it. I need to read around a bit more, but I suspect I may need to be using the Windows 8 Boot Loader. It all seems to go well, except when I reboot and select the new Windows 8 multi boot menu item – when I do this it flips back into my default Windows 7 and runs the repair dialog. No harm is done, but the underlying error appears to be a failure to locate a boot loader.

Anyway, so as not to have wasted my time, below is what I tried to do :-(…all the below stuff works great for Windows 7 VHDs by the way 😉

For the purposes of this article, let’s first create a working folder at the root of C drive, called VHD.