Test stuff on a clean PC is an everyday need. Known solutions are using a virtual PC (e.g. Virtual Box) or having a separate test PC independent from your work PC. However there is a third option that saves the cost for an extra PC and offers the native performance of your work PC. Up from Windows 8 your PC is able to boot from a VHD file (Virtual hard disk). This will allow the following scenario:
- Your are working on your work PC and want to do a little test on a clean PC
- With Windows Explorer you go to the file location of your VHDs (e.g. for a Windows 10 clean install it is a 10 GB file)
- There is a dirty one you used before and a clean copy, you delete the dirty, make a new clean copy and rename one clean copy to be used
- You click the iReboot tray icon and select the VHD option and afterwards you reboot the PC, that’s it
- When finished with your testing you select the “host” PC, do a reboot and back you are to your work PC
Step-by-step guide for setting this up
- You need to get a commercial license of EasyBCD and iReboot from https://neosmart.net (40 USD) and install it on the “host” PC
- Install Windows 10 into a VHD image by either
- using VirtualBox https://www.virtualbox.org or
- installing on a real PC and applying the toll disk2vhd afterwards
- Inside the virtual machine open a command prompt with administrator privileges and execute the command bcdedit /set nointegritychecks on
- Copy the VHD file to the “host” PC (ideally using the clone feature in VirtualBox)
- Add the VHD file as second boot option with EasyBCD
- Select the VHD in iReboot and reboot
- This will boot the VHD the first time
- Install iRebbot also to the VHD and apply any changes you might want to have on the clean PC (e.g. activate Windows, install Fiddler)
- Select the “host PC” in iReboot and reboot
- Make a copy of the clean PC VHD (Takes 90 seconds on a SSD)
- Your are done!
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