How to create a boot entry without hypervisor

Technical / January 28, 2016 / Jasper Siegmund / 1

These days I’m working a lot with Android emulators. Both the Google as well as the Visual Studio one rely on visualization technology, but different ones. The problem with this is that only one of two technologies can be in use at the same time. For Android I needed Intel HAXM (Hardware Accelerated eXecution Manager) whereas Visual Studio (of course) uses Microsofts own Hyper-V technology.

Trying to install HAXM I found out that I couldn’t. Even though I was pretty sure my system is compatible, I got an error telling me it wasn’t. Hmmm, weird. After some digging around I found out the above and because I was already running Hyper-V I was now screwed.

The easy solution is to just uninstall hyper-v, but that might not be the best solution when you’re actually using it. So I dug a little deeper to find out there there’s a nifty trick you can utilize. Hyper-V uses hypervisor technology which is automatically started upon booting when Hyper-V is installed. But there’s a switch you can use to disable loading it. And using bcdedit, a tool to modify your boot options, you can easily create a second entry which has the hypervisor disabled allowing you to run other virtualization techniques within the same Windows installation.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Run a command prompt window in Administrator mode.
2. Create a new boot entry based on the current one, like this:
   bcdedit /copy {current} /d “Windows 10 – No hypervisor”
3. Copy the GUID you get after the new entry has been created and paste it in the following command:
   bcdedit /set {ff-23-113-824e-5c5144ea} hypervisorlaunchtype off

And there you have it! You will now have a boot option allowing you to boot without the hypervisor active which means you can use stuff like Intel HAXM or VirtualBox for instance.

android, hypervisor, in

Jasper Siegmund