Boot into virtual machine on host boot

[axium1998]

Is it at all possible to have my system to not boot into my virtual machine with out booting into windows?

[mpack]

Create a shortcut to the VM, put the shortcut in your startup folder.

[axium1998]

I mean to start the guest with out booting into windows at all like a boot option

[mpack]

VirtualBox is a hardware simulator app running on the host OS - so the host OS must be present, this isn't dual boot. You can however run the VM as a service (see the VBoxVmService topic).

[socratis]

This is not a virtualization problem. This is called dual-booting.

Unless you are talking about the really advanced technique of accessing another existing installation on your physical machine, as a virtual machine on VBox via raw disk access.

[axium1998]

@mpack So, windows (host) needs to be running in order to start the vm? It can't be done at a BIOS start-up?

[mpack]

Correct.

[axium1998]

That's a bummer. Anyway, thanks for helping me

[BillG]

Without the host OS, the virtual machine does not exist. It is just a couple of files on the file system. VirtualBox, running on top of the host OS, creates the virtual machine from these files.

[axium1998]

Now that I've been thinking, is it possible to start just enough services to run the vm? I know there is a way to change the services at start by using msconfig.exe, not starting unneeded services but those needed for vbox?

[mpack]

VirtualBox is a complex app, I think it's safer to assume that it needs most host OS services. Why does it matter to you that there's an underlying OS?

[axium1998]

It's just something I was curious about, and I was wondering if I could run the vm OS like a normal OS install on my hard drive and not risk screwing up my C drive.

[mpack]

? There's no risk of a normal VM screwing up your C drive, it's a completely isolated environment, a separate PC. If you tried running a minimal host OS with the VM having "raw" access to a physical host drive then you certainly would risk trashing the host.