Running native XP partition as virtual under Linux

[moxie]

Now, I have read the "Windows XP as Native and Virtual" or something like that in the tutorials section, but I did not find the solution to my problem, so I'll try a question. It is like this:

I have a box that dualboots, Fedora (95% of the time) and Windows XP. It would be excellent if I could access the XP partition as a VM from the Fedora environment, meaning that I never had to think about dualbooting, but somehow I can't get it to work. I have access to the partition (added the normal user to the disk group (Yes, I know it is not recommended - I'll try to tighten it down once I get it working)), and it boots without a hitch when, uh, booting into it, but when I try to access it from virtualbox, I get a black window with a flashing underline cursor in the upper left corner. It does see the partition (it reports the proper size, and it complains in another way if I remove it), it just seems it doesn't see it as bootable.

The tutorial mentioned above assumes that I install XP through virtualbox first, but in this case I already have an installation on a partition that I want to use. Wipe and reinstall through VB is not a pleasant option, since the installation is a workstation image rolled out from the IT department, and I'd prefer to try to solve it without having to call out the IT guys to get access to the installation image and whatnot.

So: Is there a known problem? Is there any information I need to provide to tell what the problem is? Should I have SEARCHED THE BOARDS, FOOL!

[stefan.becker]

Search in the Tutorial Section, there are several Howtos for this.

[moxie]

Well, I did search the tutorial section, both for windows guests and linux hosts, and the tutorial I found assumes that you start out with a blank partition and then installs the guest through VirtualBox. I haven't found one where you start out with the guest OS already installed on the partition.

I also found several tutorials for packing up a partition into a virtual machine file, later to run as virtual, but that is also not what I want. What did I miss?

[stefan.becker]

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=9697

[moxie]

Yes, that is the one I have read. It states, at the beginning:

This article covers how to set up such a configuration from scratch. If you're looking to boot an existing Windows installation in VirtualBox please have a look at HOWTO: manage VDIs and import native installations instead. While using an existing installation is less work initially you're very likely to encounter driver related problems if you want to keep booting the installation natively also. This is why I chose to write about a from-scratch method instead.

(my emphasis)

...and, as it says, step 4 in the tutorial is "Installation in VM", and assuming an initially empty partition. I have also looked at the referred HOWTO: managed VDIs and import native installations (http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=1966), and as far as I can gather, it covers different methods of converting an existing XP installation to a VDI and mount that in a virtual machine. Also probably nice, but not what I wanted. However, I did find something that might answer my questions further down:

Did you install the operating system in your VM to the partition? Or is there an "old" OS installation and you try to boot it with a virtual machine? The latter won't work because there is a completely different (virtual) hardware.

...which, I suppose, makes sense. So the answer might be "It won't work". The post after that, however, implies that it might:

Check the sticky in the Windows Guests forum. That has a more recent howto on how to accomplish this.

...but the sticky is, as far as I can gather, this post referred here. Which does not, unless I am quite blind (which might be possible), provide a method to accomplish this. So, having read that far, I kinda gave up and asked the question in the original post. However, now I have delved deeper into the suggestions thread, there is someone there on page 9 that is trying to do the same thing that I want to, so I'll take a look at that. Ta all

[Martin]

If I remember correctly, I had to specify a different/changeable MBR for my single partition access vmdk. See manual chp. 9.7.1.2
After that I used some kind of "fixmbr/fixboot" from inside the not booting VM to fix that MBR to boot again. This way the original MBR doesn't get disturbed.