virtualbox.org

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

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

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

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).

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.

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

Correct.

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

? 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.