Expanding a VHD into an actual hard-drive partition

[IAmBill]

Is it possible to take a VHD and write it directly to the hard drive, rewrite the Master Boot Record, and run it directly from boot?

I have a desire to do some testing with my physical hardware and I'd like to do this... is it possible or do I have to install from the disk?

[vbox4me2]

Use clonezilla or ghost, its the same when migrating a machine into a VM but then the other way around. (p2v & v2p)

[mpack]

I would vote to add Acronis Trueimage to that list for consideration as well - a lot of people prefer it to Ghost.

One proviso, TrueImage works great for me provided I avoid native SATA modes (most BIOSes have an IDE emulation mode for SATA drives, so native SATA is easily avoided during a drive restore - this mode can always be turned off later). Sasquatch swears that Acronis handles SATA just fine, but that hasn't been my experience. This avoidable (and debateable?) problem is IMHO a small price to pay for pretty good functionality otherwise.

I've not tried Clonezilla. For a function this important I'm more comfortable relying on supported commercial software.

ps. I run Acronis TrueImage from a BartPE bootable CD. On an ISO image this is very handy for attaching to and running inside arbitrary VBox VMs.