So I felt a little adventurous, since the dual-boot/native install of windows I was using could be trashed. I did the following to try and get the native install to boot inside the virtual machine, and visa versa.
1) Boot native windows
2) Install MergeIDE
3) Boot into native Linux
4) Setup VDMK disk for the windows partition (/dev/sda1 in my case)
5) Create a grub.iso to boot the windows install
This is really short, but this is working for me. Laptop is running XP and Fedora 10.
At this point, I am able to boot into either the VM or natively with out any stability issues. I'm trying to figure out a few things though.
1) Do hardware profiles allow for me to have a separate list of services? (ie: can I run the Catalyst ATI stuff only when running in native mode?)
2) If I have Guest Additions installed, the Native install will Blue Screen on me after about 5-10 minutes of activity. The machine reboots so quickly, that I am only able to . Also my mouse is totally hosed. The cursor stays in the bottom left corner, and my synaptics mouse doesn't move the mouse at all. If I plug in a USB mouse, the cursor will move around properly, with the exception that every second, it returns to the lower left corner, making the mouse useless. Un-installing the Guest Additions resolves both the BSOD and Mouse issues that I'm experiencing. Similar to the issues described in this bug:
http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/1633
3) Who does this sort of advanced stuff with Windows anyway? I'm sitting here with my finger up my nose trying to figure out how to troubleshoot some of these windows issues. Does anybody have some good reading material on this stuff?
This is my school laptop, and my school's open wifi requires me to have an anti-virus software installed. I just use their McAfee software. The trick I'm mostly interested in is disabling McAfee when inside the VM, and enable it when booting Natively. While I can enable/disable manually when I shutdown Windows each time, it'd be nice if this was something that hardware profiles could manage for me, but so far I can't figure out how to do it. The same thing goes for my Catalyst software from ATI. I'd like it to only run in Native mode. I wouldn't worry so much about these problems if I had more than 1GB of memory. Running both OS's on 1GB of memory is a little more difficult when you have to load resource hogs like Anti-Virus and Video card software.