Wow! I didn’t think this day would come so soon. I have wanted this feature not long after seeing virtual machines in action. The ability to boot from a virtual hard drive image. You can now do exactly that in Windows 7. All that’s left is to be able to switch between them dynamically having each one instantly come out of hibernation as it is activated.
Here is a link to get you started: http://edge.technet.com/Media/Windows-7-Boot-from-VHD/
You can also create a VHD from a physical disk using this: http://blogs.technet.com/aviraj/archive/2009/10/09/sysinternals-released-disk2vhd-v1-0.aspx – a great way to backup your system too 
Update:
There are some gotchas that you need to be aware of, Scott Hanselman has a couple of posts here and here. There’s a FAQ on Technet and a team blog post. Here’s even more information.
You can use ImageX to get the image loaded onto the VHD. ImageX is part of a 1.7GB download or you can get it here for less than 1MB!
Update 2:
It just seems weird to boot into a VHD, and then be able to see the host system’s disks. One of the files on that host system of course is the VHD I booted from. Weird!
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Wow! Indeed. Though at the moment this seems like a solution looking for a problem.
Not to dis this capability. I use virtual machine on a regular basis these days. but definitely a feature to keep tucked in the back of ones mind.
All we need now is the boot loader to offer a menu of multiple VHD images that we can select from….is this an option that can be implemented using the C:\BOOT.INI on the physical disk for example?
The boot.ini doesn’t exist in Windows 7. It is replaced by bcdedit which is more powerful I guess if a little more obtuse. You can have a menu of multiple VHD images, although it does not enumerate a directory for you which would have been nice.