installing winXP in a linux virtualbox

[ginestre]

Probably a silly question but I prefer to ask rather than break things through ignorance. I've installed vbox in ubuntu feisty, and it works. Now I've launched the virtual winxp installation, and that starts ok. But when the win xp install process asks me if I want to format my (virtual) hard disk, should I say yes? It's asking to format the whole of the space allocated to the (expandable) disk I defined in vbox set up, and I presume that if I say "yes, format it all" it won't ACTUALLY go ahead and do it- will it? What precautions should I take?

[bodhi.zazen]

Probably a silly question but I prefer to ask rather than break things through ignorance. I've installed vbox in ubuntu feisty, and it works. Now I've launched the virtual winxp installation, and that starts ok. But when the win xp install process asks me if I want to format my (virtual) hard disk, should I say yes? It's asking to format the whole of the space allocated to the (expandable) disk I defined in vbox set up, and I presume that if I say "yes, format it all" it won't ACTUALLY go ahead and do it- will it? What precautions should I take?

That is a very astute question. Yes you need to format the disk, you may partition the disk just as you would if you were actually installing an OS. You can even dual boot your virtual OS, or boot your virtual windows install to an iso or virtual floppy if yo like

This is NOT the same as formatting your entire hard drive, so you should be good to go.

[ginestre]

Thanks for that. Can I come back with some follow up questions? I like to understand, where I can!
So, assuming I've understood so far: I have set up Vbox on my ubuntu feisty system and during setup I said that a portion of the ext3 disk I was on, should become the HD for my guest (winXP) system. I chose the 'expand on demand' option.

The next step isto install the guest OS. When I proceed to set up XP, XP will see this portion of the ext3 disk as an unformatted discrete disk on its own, and will ask to format it in NTFS.
I must choose yes, and the portion of the ext3 disk wlil actually be physically reformatted (within ext3? what effect does that have on the rest of the disk?) to NTFS, becoming a sort of disk-in-a-disk, and probably (?) not directly writeable in ubuntu without some tweaking. But how will ubuntu see the NTFS disk-in-a-disk ? Or by some magic does this all only exist when the guest OS is running?

And what exactly did the 'expandable' option mean, if the whole area is to be formatted?

[bodhi.zazen]

It is all very magic isn't it ?

You ask great, probing questions, my best answer is this : I-xen

This is cool as well : Mounting .vdi file on host

Another very cool feature is that Hard drive shares. I mean, I can mount a XFS file system and access it in Windows with VirtualBox shares, no need for any XFS driver on Windows or complex networking for the file shares.

My current interest is to play with loading virtualBox on a very light OS, like DSL (the entire OS is 50 Mb), running DSL as a base, and nothing but Virtual Guests on top.

Something like this : BeaFanatIX ~ The iso is 150 Mb . Once it is up and running it uses all of 192 Mb of RAM.