virtualbox.org

I am currently dual booting Vista/Ubuntu with virtualbox installed on both hosts. I have a windows xp and ubuntu guest machines installed with the files located on the vista NTFS partition. Is there anyway I can get my real ubuntu host to use/share the same virtual machines that are hosted on my Vista partition? I am guessing there should be a way since Ubuntu can read NTFS.

I also want to be able to share the saved states of the virtual machines, no matter what real partition i am currently running. Is there anyway to do this?

Thank you in advance for your help, and I hope i was clear in addressing my question

-hal

Make another partition that can be read/written to from both OS's and move all the vbox xml and VDI files there.

Sharing the VM, yes, that can be done. Sharing the saved state: only with some manual work which you don't really want. To get the saved state from one host to the other involves editing the XML file associated with the VM so it contains the saved state. Something that can be done when transferring the state from Windows to Linux, but you can't do it the other way around because Windows can't read the Linux file system. By default, saved states and snapshots are saved in the user profile folder, just like the machine settings and hard disk. You can change this, but it will still give you some work.

There is one thing you absolutely can't do, and that is use one VM settings file for both systems. Each OS has it's own layout because of the differences between them. E.g. audio, physical drives, shared folders, all those things are different. You don't have a /dev/scd0 on Windows, and you don't have DirectSound on Linux.

So, overall, it's too much work to think about sharing saved states and snapshots between two entirely different Hosts.