Hyper-V - Native Boot VHD  

Kari said:

I can't help you.

The fact is that when Windows is booted from a VHD, system sees and treats it as any physical installation on that same hardware. That a NIC does not work or does not find correct drivers, not even be shown in network adapters has nothing to do with Windows being installed on VHD instead of HDD. For system, a natively booted VHD is as any hard disk. All hardware devices and drivers used are the same as if the same Windows version and edition would be clean installed on physical disk on that same machine.

If there is a solution for your issue, I don't know. I would start with running network troubleshooter. When searching for help, you will see that this issue is not uncommon: Network adapter not shown - Bing

Kari

I have tried the troubleshooter included in Windows 1703 and it could not find the cause of the problem. The tutorial works as intended and I have no problem with it at all. It is disappointing that no network connections were found in the native booted vhdx and I could not find any way to resolve the issue. The vhdx file used for this native boot was created from my current Windows 10 15063.250 and the WIFI works without issue. I will grant you there is a great deal of information about "Network adapter not shown" on Bing. However there is little information that deals with "Network adapter not shown in a native boot vhdx" which is what this issue is about.

Thank goodness this entire exercise was more of a curiosity than about an actual need.

I see that your physical Ethernet adapter is disabled in device manager. Could that have something to do with it?

Also, some laptops use a software-enabled switch to enable and disable the Wifi adapter, and if you don't have this driver installed, the adapter won't show up.

Kari said:

That might be because it is completely totally absolutely profoundly irrelevant

Kari

You are right.

So irrelevant that I have deleted the entire partition I was using for this exercise. My curiosity is gone. In retrospect perhaps I should have started a new thread with this issue over in the Drivers and Hardware forum.

Yes it was a good idea and it may have had something to do with this issue. I may rekindle my interest if a compatible driver is released for the Ethernet NIC in Windows 1703. I learned some things that I did not know from your tutorial. Thanks for all your input and all you do for Windows TenForums.

Hello, and thank you for the great article. i have a question about primary usage. If a system is configured to boot automatically into the VM, will i be able to use it exactly as i would any other OS? What im wondering about is backup. i would like to create a system to natively boot from the VHD, create a backup volume for the full backup image, and one for the incremental backup image. What i am trying to build is a system that i can easily perform a full restore on if the VM gets corrupted by ransomware or other malware. so say one day i am surfing and catch a nasty virus that hangs the system. i would like to go into the management console and import my backup. once i have my VM running again then i can update any other files from the incremental backup. would this work? the boot information will stay the same correct?

Hi Kari,

very very helpful post. I really like it. I had already done this before I found your great tutorial. But that time I was running into an issue and I would like to ask you if you could give me a hint how to solve this.

The issue is when I switch between the Hyper-V and start the VDHX File there and then back to Native Boot from the Bootmenu, Windows keeps asking for a new activation. So each time I change it will activate. Now it seems that I have been run into the limit of activations. Under this circumstances I need to decide either to use Hyper-V or Native Boot, which was not my plan. I want to use both systems in parallel.
Can you help me out here, how do you manage that, and overcome this activation stuff? Many Thanks.

Cheers
Maik

Hi cereberus,

thanks for the reply. But even if I would by 2 versions of windows, how can we solve this technically?
I mean each time it will switch hardware and asks again. So in this case if even doesn't help to buy 2 licenses.
Is that assumption correct?