virtualbox.org

hello so here is the situation i have duel boot system with openSuSE 11.1 and Windows Seven and i have one Windows XP VM that i want to be able to use from both systems.

i got the same version on VB on both hosts and i got the machines and vdi stored on a common partition where both operating systems of full read/write to and in the VB options i have both of them pointing to the same disk image and machines folders but the machine i made in openSuSE still wont show in win7.

i dont really want to use a separate vm with the 2 os's because of disk space and convince.

i was pretty sure i was able to do this with the older versions

You need to create two VMs, one in each Host. The settings need to be exactly the same, including MAC address for the virtual NIC. Of course, a few settings cannot be the same, shared folders use different paths and the sound system is different between Linux and Windows. Now mount the same VDI in each VM and you're good to go.
Now there two things you have to keep in mind: No snapshots and saved states for the VM, or you hack the XML files of each VM to include the new snapshot files (you don't want to do this, takes too much time, a backup is much better). And the second thing you must know is that defragmenting the hard drive where the VDI resides is out of the question. I've had several times that the NTFS partition forced a disk check when I booted to Windows after a defrag from Windows. The first boot, it didn't give an error, defragmented it, and bam, disk check. You can loose your VM that way, or other important data.

ah ya the reason why i wanted to do this vs instead of just cloning the vm was for the save states but thanks for the info

how would i move vm's around than cause now im trying to store my windows host vm's and my suse host vm's in differnt dirs and VB is complaing even know i told it to look in the new dirs for them and made the changes in the media manager

You change the VDI location in the general settings, move the VDI to the new location if you haven't done already, register the VDI from the new location (unregister the old one first) and mount it to the VM that needs it.