Booting from a VHD GOTCHAS

So I wanted to convert my virtual machine into a native boot, how hard can that be? Well because I am so lucky (maybe not!) I faced and done all the wrong steps and took all the bad turns. In this post I will concentrate more on the bad things I made and the problems I faced maybe to help you avoiding them.

So I started off by reading how to do this over the internet and I found several very good blogs on how to perform this task and I will not go through all the the steps in detail as you will find them more detailed over so many places. Now what was different is that all blogs were talking about building your VHD and installing the OS from scratch. But in my case I already had my VHD ready and it is working in Hyper-V and I have installed all software I need but I had a memory problem (see I am running on a 4GB laptop :( ). So I prepared myself and came up to a checklist of steps to make as follows.

Edit the boot entry in my machine and add a new one pointing to my already existing VHD.
Start my VHD in Hyper-V as usual and SYSPREP it to remove all drivers' dependencies.
Restart my machine and then choose the new VHD boot and start it in safe mode.
Allow it to install device drivers and restart. AND viola all done
Let me walk you through my experience. So I started by adding the new boot using BCDEDIT command lines

bcdedit /copy {default} /d "MY vhd boot"

bcdedit /set {guid} device vhd=[F:]\My.vhd

bcdedit /set {guid} osdevice vhd=[F:]\My.vhd

Then I said I am not going to perform sysprep! So restarted my machine and BAM it is saying that there is a bad entry in the boot store and press enter to continue that led me back to my original OS. So I checked and found that my BIOS had disabled by default bringing up and booting from USB drives and since my VHD is on an external USB drive it failed.

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