Boot your computer with Windows 2008 R2 Virtual Machine (VM)

Note: To use this trick, you have to have windows 7 or later(other than student version) or Windows 2008 R2 (or later) installed natively on your computer.

I understand that most of us have had the difficulty in using the virtual machines because of the computer's resources not fully available to the VM. The computer usually slows down and both the host and the guest machines start dying. I discovered a convenient way of running the Windows 2008 R2 VM with all the power that your computer posses.

In this tutorial, I will explain how the VM that contains Windows 2008 Server R2 with Dynamics AX 2012 installed can be used to actually boot the computer so that the VM will consume the whole power of your computer. I will be using a Windows 7 Ultimate Edition of windows natively installed.

Required Softwares:

1. EasyBCD (http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD): It is a free for personal use software and enables to update the boot record of the computer to make it boot with the VM.
2. Virtual Box (http://www.virtualbox.com): This is a virtual machine platform that enables the user to run virtual machines.
3. Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 VM (Trial: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2021579 or from Microsoft Partnersource)

VirtualBox Configuration
Steps to follow:

1. Install both EasyBCD and Virtual Box on your machine.
2. Configure and run the Windows 2008 VM using Virtual Box as per below screen captures.
   
   
   
   
3. Once the machine is created, start it until the login screen appears.
   
4. Once the login screen appears, it is save to properly turn the machine off using the close button.
   

The reason for above set of steps is to ensure that the VM understands your computer and somewhat learns the hardware configuration. Now we configure the boot configuration records to actually make the computer dual boot.

Updating the Boot Configuration Data (BCD)

1. Open EasyBCD and on the left panel click 'Add New Entry'.
2. In the highlighed area, provide the information of the VM.
   
3. Once done, press 'Add Entry' and press 'Edit Boot Menu'. You should see the screen like below:
   

Once you're done with both the sets of procedures, you can restart your computer. Select 'Windows 2008 R2' option. Based on your computer's power, Windows will take some time for the first time to initialize the hardware and software configuration.