We had Windows 7 set as the primary OS, so we were not without a system. Once we had the VHD removed, we thought Windows would be smart enough to clean up the boot loader, but we were not so lucky. Your changes could make the partition unbootable. Note: Always make sure to back up any data that you want to keep before deleting or modifying partitions on VHDs. To free up the space, we deleted the VHD. There was no data other than the OS installation contained within the file because we had used it only to prepare a blog post about booting from Virtual Hard Disks. Recently, we decided we could make better use of some disk space that we had set aside to create a bootable VHD for Windows Server 2008 R2.

In Windows Vista and later versions of Windows, the bootloader was moved from boot.ini to a utility called BCDEdit. Windows handles dual-booting by using boot.ini to display a menu of bootable choices or partitions found on the current system.

Other reasons to dual-boot might include replication of a client environment. Sometimes dual-booting a system is a handy way to test new software, a new operating system, or an application that needs to be run in a specific version of Windows. Here’s how to modify the boot config data with the new tool.

Windows boot loader