I'm searching for a solution to boot a native OS on a hard disk as a virtual machine.
It's like what VMware Fusion did on a Mac which boots Windows in Boot Camp as a virtual machine.
In detail, I have Windows installed on /dev/sda2 and Ubuntu 11.10 on /dev/sda5.
Is there anyway to use a virtual machine software to boot the Windows on /dev/sda2 as a virtual machine while I'm using Ubuntu?
You can do this via VirtualBox raw disk access. ( http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html ) It basically creates a "virtual" disk file that points to the actual partition and loads it as a disk drive in the VM. I've installed Linux guest in VB on Windows host in such a way, and the installation can boot from the VM or by itself.
Yes, I did this long ago following this guide:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-us-nm/2008-February/000521.html
of course, always backup and be careful!
Essentially:
Used a USB 3.5 HD enclosure and connect the XP drive to it.
If the drive was shutdown uncleanly you may need to manually
mount it with the following command.
sudo mount ntfs-3g /dev/whereyourdriveis /mount/somemountpoint -o
force
Once the drive is mounted under linux contiunue to step 2.
More Info : I should add, I have successfully done this, but I also had success using this method years even years before. So there are at least two known and tested ways for accomplishing this that I can tell you.
As answered, this also can be done in VirtualBox, this is the way that works for me
Always, make sure that you are running as Administrator(Windows) or Sudo(Linux) , any changes that you do will write to the REAL disk, so be carefull
In Windows
C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox>VBoxManage.exe internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename "E:\virtualbox\linuxhd.vmdk" -rawdisk "\\.\PhysicalDrive1"
RAW host disk access VMDK file E:\virtualbox\linuxhd.vmdk created successfully.
In Linux
$ VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename "~/linuxhd.vmdk" -rawdisk "/dev/sda"
It will create a file with something around 1kb
that is a link to the physical hard drive.
Then create a Virtual Machine as ever you do.
If you want to map only a partition
At Windows
\\.\Physicaldrive1 -partitions 1
(Disk start with 0, partitions with 1)
At Linux (Much more intuitive)
/dev/sda1
/dev/sda2
etc.
Eventually you can get resolution issues even after install vboxadditions
, in my experience the problem is your /etc/X11/xorg.conf
it is configured to your specific real hardware specs(I have a offboard GPU for example), least in my case I solve it simply removing this file (xorg auto configure at boot, only will not work if you set some specific setting), so run:
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.original && sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Reference
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