virtualbox.org

Hi,

Is it possible to install Vbox on a boot camp partition?

There are no silly questions, but only silly answers. Her is my silly answer:
Yes you can. Install Vista under Bootcamp, obtain virtual-box for windows and install it onto your bootcamp-partition.

But I guess that isn't what you meant.

I guess you want to use your BootCamp-installation as a disc from virtual-box or you want to convert your bootcamp-partition to a virtual-disc, that you can use with virtual-box. As far as I know both things will not work at the moment, but maybe somewhen in the future.

Let me be more specific.

I already created a boot camp partition and installed XP.
Now, I want to be able to run Windows from my iMac envrironment.
Since I already went through the trouble of creating the partition, If I install Vbox on my iMac will it recognize my "already-created" windows partition.

Thanks for the trouble!!

No, that will not work.
Parallels offers the possibility to convert a Bootcamp-partition to a virtual-disc, but not vbox.
Access of raw discs currently will not work on the mac, as far as I know.
And, your Bootcamp-partition is formated as NTFS, but without drivers Mac-OS will not read NTFS-formated volumes.

ok thanks.

Once my Vbox is installed and Windows is installed, can i simply put in the leopard CD to install the proper drivers?

if not, I,m not sure if there is a serious benefit in using Vbox instead of Parrallel.

Thanks

The windows-drivers from the Leopard-DVD are for bootcamp only. For Virtual-box you need to install the guest-additions, have a look in the manual about how to do this or search the forum.

To the question Vbox vs. Parallels: Vbox is free for private use, parallels not, future updates for Vbox will remain to be free, for a major update of Parallels you will have to pay. There are things that still work better under Parallels, like usb-support, support for importing a bootcamp-partition, and if I need to synchronize my old nokia-cellphone I still have to use Parallels. But this all are problems I think the Vbox-staff is aware of and I guess they working on it. On the other hand I have read that support for non-Windows OS' is much better in Vbox.

I'm using Vbox for my daily work and only for some rare tasks I have to use parallels. Everyday I look into this forum, but I never have looked into any Parallels-forum. The first virtualiser I used was Virtual PC on an old Mac PowerPC 7200 and Virtual-PC was developed by Innotek who also has developed Vbox.

You have to do the decision by yourself!