Dual Booting and Virtual Box

[stanczyk]

I've read the FAQ's, searched the forums and I'm confused.

I have a Windows XP Laptop with 2 gigs of memory, 180GB disk space. On top of this I run openSuse 11.0 in Virtualbox. For most activities this is perfect. But for some embedded systems work I need raw device access via dd. This goes badly in the Virtualbox Suse.

I have 60 gig free, unpartitioned on the hard drive. I'm running VirtualBox 2.2.

I think I can put down a partition in the empty space and put Suse in it. What I don't know is the order to do things in.

I want: a Windows system that can run Suse in virtualbox. When the need arises, I need to boot directly into that Suse system. (I don't care if I put grub in the mbr or boot from the Suse DVD.)

So what order do I build things? Windows is already in. Do I put in the suse partition first and install directly from the dvd, then vmdk stuff? OR: Do I vmdk, install into the partition via virtualbox and then boot via the Suse disk?

[Sasquatch]

I think it's best to install SuSE on the RAW VMDK image first, so you have a proper MBR for that part. Then you can try to boot it natively with the boot CD/DVD and see how that goes. I don't think that part will work, so you have to 'rescue a broken system' to install the new MBR/Bootloader so you can boot SuSE natively.

You can do the other way around too, first Native, then with RAW VMDK and either extract or add a separate MBR to that.

I don't have experience with this sort of thing, so unless you have a better response soon, I would go with the first option.