[ltp] Installing from Recovery CDs in VirtualBox

Jeffrey L. Taylor linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:38:24 -0500


Quoting Ismael Olea <ismael@olea.org>:
> On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 12:10 AM, Micha Feigin <michf@post.tau.ac.il> wrote:
> >
> >
> > > Also, I think VMWare have a tool for taking a physical machine and
> > > virtualising it.
> > >
> >
> > This can be touch and go, milage will vary, and at least supposadly windows
> > will want a reactivation as the hardware has changed (I know that it is
> > very
> > problematic to use the same partition for a standard boot and a virtual
> > boot at
> > the same time)
> >
> 
> In my experience, trying to use the windows partition for booting inside and
> outside VMWare never worked:
> 
>    - OEM instalation boots native, but doesn't boot inside vmware
>    - VMWare installation in hardisk partition, as a native installation,
>    boots on VMWare but it doesn't in native
> 
> I've never investigated why this happens. If somebody set up this
> configuration would be nice how to do it.
> 

Several years ago I had the same Windows 2000 installation working both native
and in VMware 3.x.  It handled it much more gracefully than RedHat Linux that
came with the machine.  The hardware profiles in SuSE helped, but did not
completely fix the problem.  With time and updates and new versions of Windows
and VMware, this ceased working.  Now I don't try.  This was with Pogo Linux
who ship machines dual booting.  Perhaps they tweaked both to achieve this,
though it did not ship with VMware (VMware was pretty much the only option at
the time).

Jeffrey