“Dual boot” with one installation of Windows

As you may have found out by reading this Blog, you’ll know that I am running Windows Server 2008 on my laptop with Hyper-V enabled. up tillnow I always switched  Hard disks to boot into Windows XP with virtual server. I found the loss of performance in virtual server under Hyper-v very bad. Machines did not perform really.

Today I read something about booting server 2008 without starting the Hypervisor. I tried setting up a second boot entry where I disabled the Hypervisor, and lo and behold: I have Hardware virtualization available again. so now I “only” have to reboot into the Hypervisor less install to run my Virtual server/virtual PC VM’s instead of removing the disk.

This is how I did it:

Open an CMD prompt as administrator.

Type:

bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Microsoft Windows Server 2008 – no hypervisor" the entry between quotation marks is the name popping up in the menu.

This will result in a GUID returned.

Copy this GUID for the next thing:

bcdedit /set GUID hypervisorlaunchtype off

Reboot your system and see the menu appear. Choose the new entry and try for instance securable to see that you have Hardware Virtualization available.