Raw Disk Vista VM and Guest Additions -- possible?
Posted: 23. Jul 2009, 06:23
Hey all,
First post around here. I managed to set up a virtual machine running off of my physical disk which contains an existing 64-bit Vista installation. My host is Ubuntu Jaunty, but -- I suspect -- my question is not host-specific.
Vista works both in the VM and when booting into it directly (which is already a massive accomplishment given my inability to do this with any other virtualization software ever). But... I'd like to have seamless enabled and the ability to resize my desktop when I'm using the VM, so I want to install the Guest Additions.
I've seen that this caused problems for people with an XP guest, and they got around those problems using Hardware Profiles (i.e. 1 profile for standalone boot, and 1 profile for the VM boot, and GA were installed when booted up in the latter and so new drivers are only applicable to the VM profile). However, Vista doesn't have Hardware Profiles (their raison-d'etre is laptop docking stations, right?), ostensibly because it's supposed to be smart enough to detect hardware changes automatically.
I don't want to install GA only to find out I can no longer boot Vista directly (or worse, cannot boot it at all), so my question is as follows:
Has anyone been able to do this? That is, has anyone been able to run Vista successfully both as a guest OS in VirtualBox and directly from the physical drive with Guest Additions installed?
If you have, can you tell me exactly what you did? Maybe there's something non-intuitive like installing the GA when booted into Vista directly or manually disabling some drivers or something else like that.
Also, if someone has definitive explanation of why this cannot be done, that would help as well -- I'd at least stop thinking about it. Finally, feel free to correct my terminology. Between raw/standalone/directly/physical/metal/bare/etc., I'm confused as to what's the proper way to refer to what I'm trying to do.
Thanks in advance.
First post around here. I managed to set up a virtual machine running off of my physical disk which contains an existing 64-bit Vista installation. My host is Ubuntu Jaunty, but -- I suspect -- my question is not host-specific.
Vista works both in the VM and when booting into it directly (which is already a massive accomplishment given my inability to do this with any other virtualization software ever). But... I'd like to have seamless enabled and the ability to resize my desktop when I'm using the VM, so I want to install the Guest Additions.
I've seen that this caused problems for people with an XP guest, and they got around those problems using Hardware Profiles (i.e. 1 profile for standalone boot, and 1 profile for the VM boot, and GA were installed when booted up in the latter and so new drivers are only applicable to the VM profile). However, Vista doesn't have Hardware Profiles (their raison-d'etre is laptop docking stations, right?), ostensibly because it's supposed to be smart enough to detect hardware changes automatically.
I don't want to install GA only to find out I can no longer boot Vista directly (or worse, cannot boot it at all), so my question is as follows:
Has anyone been able to do this? That is, has anyone been able to run Vista successfully both as a guest OS in VirtualBox and directly from the physical drive with Guest Additions installed?
If you have, can you tell me exactly what you did? Maybe there's something non-intuitive like installing the GA when booted into Vista directly or manually disabling some drivers or something else like that.
Also, if someone has definitive explanation of why this cannot be done, that would help as well -- I'd at least stop thinking about it. Finally, feel free to correct my terminology. Between raw/standalone/directly/physical/metal/bare/etc., I'm confused as to what's the proper way to refer to what I'm trying to do.
Thanks in advance.