I work on a laptop daily. My primary OS is Windows 7. A month ago I replaced my dvd-player with a hdd-caddy +hdd. On this disk I installed Debian. Now I can multiboot by choosing my boot device from the bios-menu.
On both OSes have VirtualBox installed. When I boot my laptop with Windows, I sometimes want to use Debian. I created a virtual machine which links to my physical Debian hdd. This can be done with:
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename "<>.vmdk" -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive<>
On Debian I have VirtualBox Guest additons installed, so I can enjoy the automatic resizing of the screen resolution etc.
The other way around also works: I can boot Debian and from there start VirtualBox and start a virtual machine with the physical Windows hdd. Works as good as the other way around. I can even install VirtualBox Guest additons but there is one problem. The computer won't boot Windows as host OS anymore. It is stuck after "Loaded driver \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\CLASSPNP.sys. After uninstalling Guest additons (from Debian + VirtualBox ofcourse) Windows is booting as a host OS again.
I also noticed that when I run Windows as host OS I'm not able to install GuestAdditions. This could be done to prevent users from doing something useless, or (and) this could be done to prevent users from breaking (not booting) the OS.
Is it known that GuestAdditons on a host OS breaks it? Maybe I'm just unlucky with my hardware + GuestAdditons. If this is know, I would like to do a feature request;-)
Gr,
Pieter Verberne