Boot into a physical windows partition, virtually

While we were discussing virtualization in Bahrain LUG's meeting a couple of days ago, I promised the attendees to show them how I relieved myself from the hassles of dual booting into Windows XP and Linux by using the free vmware server on Linux to boot virtually into my physical Windows XP partition. I encourage you to make proper backups of both systems before you embark into the following procedure just to be on the safe side.

Prerequisites:

• Dual boot system with Windows XP and Linux
• vmware server 1.0.6 or above on Linux. Here is how to install it on Ubuntu Hardy
• Unmount the Windows XP partition under Linux if it is mounted
  

Steps:

Hardware Profile

1. Boot normally into the Windows XP partition and create a new hardware profile by going to Control Panel-->System-->Hardware-->Hardware Profiles, and clicking on Copy to copy the current profile. Name the new profile "vmware"
2. Log out of windowx XP and boot into Linux.

Vmware on Linux

3. Run vmware server's wizard for a new virtual machine
4. Choose Windows XP and follow the steps in the wizard until you reach the hard disk allocation step then un-check the options of allocating space and splitting and finish the wizard
5. Go to the Edit Settings screen of the new virtual machine and delete the current virtual hard disk
   
6. Press Add to add a new hard disk and choose "use a physical disk" and choose "use entire disk"
7. power up the virtual machine and boot into windows XP in Grub, then choose the "vmware" hardware profile
8. Cancel the new hardware detection pop-ups then install vmware tools then restart the virtual machine.
   

Warnings:

• The virtual machine will boot into GRUB, so make sure you don't start your Linux partition into the virtual machine. Doing so will FUBAR your Linux partition.
• I've done this sometime back and there might be some little tweaks that I can't recall right now so give it a try and update me.
• SCSI drives may not be supported. I've done this with IDE
• DirectX is not an option in the virtual Windows XP so forget about playing games in the virtual machine
  
• The overall performance is slower compared to a physical partition boot, but with enough RAM, you won't feel handicapped.

Linux User Group Gathering

Marwan, the co-founder of Bahrain Linux User Group (LUG) presented VirtualBox virtualization technologies in our monthly meeting held earlier today.

He started by explaining the nature of virtualization technologies and their common uses. In a nutshell, virtualization allows computer users to run an operating system, like windows XP, as a guest OS on another operating system, like Linux, which functions as a host OS.

Then he walked us through the VirtualBox installation process on Ubuntu Linux which was straight forward using a HowTo article on Ubuntu's website. The fun started when he booted a WindowsXP guest OS in Ubuntu working as a window, or a full screen, with full functionality including sharing files between the two OSes.

Then he detailed down several configuration setups in VirtualBox with heated discussion by the audience, me included, comparing it to vmware, which is another virtualization product, but proprietary.

The obvious uses of virtual machines go beyond having windows XP booted in Linux. I for one use vmware to boot a guest WinXP on a host WinXP, and sometimes Linux, to access my work network through VPN. VPN clients connect a PC virtually to another network which most of the time shields the PC from internet access so when you are on the VPN, you can't access the net except through the VPN connection which may be slower compared to you local PC's internet access. Using a Guest OS VPNed in another network doesn't affect your host's internet connectivity.

Another use is for testing application that you may not want to run on your PC. A lot of security researchers use virtual machines to test security vulnerabilities and malware without affecting their PCs and local networks.

Developers also use virtualization to experiment with code on different platforms without the need to have multiple PCs or servers each running a different OS.

There are also tons of corporate uses of virtualization that I'll hopefully detail down in a separate post.