MIA

I tend to have to jump between OS depending on what I am doing. I finally got my act together and figured out how to set up my Ubuntu install to connect to my windows partition to save me having to reboot every time.

I have managed to get this to work only with Windows XP… Vista appears to be a nightmare for me to get working so if anyone has any success I would love to hear from you.

Also I have had different people try this on a number of different machines with varying results, so please don’t get angry if this doesn’t work for you. A lot of the time it has appeared to be windows not liking the setup used by VirtualBox. All I can suggest is to have a look at the settings tab and try different combination. In some situations people have just not been abel to get it working on their existing install and have had to reinstall windows. My advice to you if you get to that point is to just leave it be and install a separate virtual machine and just leave you partition as is should you ever want to go back to it for something.

Heres how i did it:

1. Install VirtualBox
   I installed the Sun version but I have tested with the OSE version and it worked fine. For more info on setting up the Sun version via the repositories see http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

   sudo apt-get install virtualbox-2.0
   or
   sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose

2. Add yourself to the correct groups

   sudo usermod -a -G disk,vboxusers -a `whoami`

3. Restart X [ctl-alt-bksp]
4. Create a Master Boot Record manager in a file.
   To do this you need to use install-mbr which is part of the debian package mbr and call install-mbr with the –force option.

   install-mbr --force myBootRecord.mbr

   This will create an empty boot record with a size of 512bytes

5. Identify which partition your windows install is on

   fdisk -l /dev/sda

   You should get a result similar to

   Disk /dev/sda: 82.3 GB, 82348277760 bytes
   255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 10011 cylinders
   Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
   Disk identifier: 0xf3c1f3c1
   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
   /dev/sda1 * 1 2623 21069216 7 HPFS/NTFS
   /dev/sda2 2624 9704 56878132+ 83 Linux
   /dev/sda3 9705 10011 2465977+ 5 Extended
   /dev/sda5 9705 10011 2465946 82 Linux swap / Solaris

   For me it shows my windows partition as number 1 (HPFS/NTFS)

6. Now we need to build the volume

   VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ./WinXP.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda -partitions 1 -mbr ./myBootRecord.mbr -relative

   Some instructions I have found say to include ‘–register’ but I have had issues with this so leave it off to register manually

7. Now we need to set up the Windows Partition so now we boot back into windows
8. In order to make windows usable independently its is recommended you set up different hardware profiles.
   • Click Start > Control Panel > System
   • On the Hardware tab, select Hardware Profiles
   • Click Copy, name the new hardware profile Physical
   • Rename the current profile to Virtual
9. Change Windows XP’s IDE controller
   • On the Hardware tab, select Device Manager
   • Right-click the IDE Controller and click Update Driver
   • Click No,.. and Next
   • Click [Advanced] and Next
   • Click Don’t search… and Next
   • Select Standard Dual channel PCI IDE controller
   • Click Next, Finish, then Close and Reboot into Linux
10. Reboot back into Linux
11. Start VirtualBox
12. Create a new Machine using the new machine wizard [new button]
13. Enter a name for the machine and select the appropriate Windows OS type
14. Choose reasonable memory size (advisable not to use more than a quarter of total memory unless using windows a lot)
15. When prompted for the hard disk to use, select existing and point it at the new .vmdk file you created in step 6.
16. From here on in you should be able to just follow the rest of the instructions and fingers crossed it all works smoothly.

N.B. You may be prompted to reactivate you copy of windows.