Virtualbox WinXP pro from a separate physical HDD

halone · Post by **halone** » 29. May 2007, 13:42

Hello,
I wanted to install Virtualbox on ubuntu Festy Fawn but to run a "native" (if I am right with the expression) operating system (Windows XP pro) on a lenovo thinkpad T60.

In fact I currently have two HDD on my laptop, one internal with Ubuntu and my DATA partition (in FAT32) and the other in the CD bay which I replaced with an HDD bay containing the windows system.

And so I always have to reboot my laptop to pass from one system to an other so, I wondered if it was possible to run the windows XP pro on Ubuntu FF via virtualbox.I have read that VMware Workstation does it but I would prefer to install Virtualbox.

It would be nice if you could help me. Thanks.

Post by **bodhi.zazen** » 29. May 2007, 16:06

You can easily run windows as a guest OS as they are called on virtualBox.

http://doc.gwos.org/index.php/VirtualBox

halone · Post by **halone** » 30. May 2007, 21:19

Well yes, but what I would like to do is a specific guest OS type. I would like to use WIndows without installing it on virtual disk. In other words I'd like to be able to use a native Windows XP already installed on an other hard disk drive with virtualbox on Ubuntu.

In fact I know that a version of VMware called "workstation" does it, but the problem is that there isn't a U. Festy Fawn version yet and that it isn't free like VMware player or Virtualbox.

If anyone could help me it would be nice.

Post by **mcp** » 30. May 2007, 23:34

halone,

I belive that it has been mentioned this capability will be in the upcoming ver.1.4. Others may correct me if this is not correct.

MCP

Devport · Post by **Devport** » 31. May 2007, 01:42

You are right :

http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/274

I installed virtualbox from svn, but I can not find a way to add a real partition - any hints ?

( Raw disks work fine in vmware as soon as one gets it to work with the disk driver, it was tricky to do with SATA because it needed seperate native / virtual drivers - most important thing is to create seperate hardware profiles - sadly it seems Vista doesn`t support hardware profiles anymore as it seems )

halone · Post by **halone** » 1. Jun 2007, 19:51

Thank you for your answers everybody. Does anyone know when this version 1.4 will be available, I just read something vague about the 2nd quarter of this year...