[Opensource] A dual boot VM question

[victor rajewski]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 9:25 AM, WEIR Andrew
<andrew.weir at thomascarr.vic.edu.au> wrote:
> Dear all
> I have a machine which dual boots Ubuntu 8.04 64 bit and Xp Sp2.
>
> What i would like to do is Boot into my Xp partition directly from within
> Ubuntu. Rather then reinstall an new virtual machine.
>
> I tried to find things in Google last night but was not able to find
> anything.
>
> I have installed virtual box and KVM but can't seem to make them boot a
> already existing installation.

It is possible in virtualbox by creating a vmdk file (vmware disk
image) which points to the physical partition. The vmdk file will be a
few bytes and is essentially a pointer. Virtualbox can use these
files. The main problem you will have is with windows XP itself; it
tends not to t like moving hardware. I think you can set up two
different hardware profiles, if you can get it to boot into VBox at
all - you might need to enter the windows recovery console the first
time you boot. Or it might just work...

Or if you can get vmware working in hardy (doesn't install quite as
easily as in earlier versions), you could just run the vmware
converter in windows to create a virtual copy... but that won't give
you the dual boot option.

Incidentally, I've been using vbox since upgrading to hardy, and it's
worth pointing out that the kernel modules needed to run a VM often
don't get updated until a few days _after_ a kernel update is
released; so when the ubuntu tells you updates are available, check to
see if a new image is there, if so, check that virtualbox-ose-modules
(or something like that) is also available for update, or else you
won't be able to run your VMs.

vik