<div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 5:42 PM, Daniel B. Thurman <<a href="mailto:dant@cdkkt.com">dant@cdkkt.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div><div></div><div class="h5">Richard Shaw wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 12:21 PM, Daniel B. Thurman <<a href="mailto:dant@cdkkt.com" target="_blank">dant@cdkkt.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> das wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Hello Friends As a member of a local linux group called GLT, a few different distros of GNU-Linux we have to handle. One or two versions of each Fedora, Ubuntu, and OpenSuse. Earlier, I installed more than one Linux on the HD just for getting some suggestion when someone is in problem. Gradually, due to the UUID and all this is becoming problemsome. One brute way out is to rewrite 'fstab' with device-names in place of UUID-s. But people say these days a lot of applications read the UUID-s, so this may get problemsome. So, after some friends suggested, I now want to go into virtualization. And I know nothing. I have a really huge amount of HD space, and 4GB memory. And my CPU has the virtualization flags. I am myself using Fedora 11 Beta and I want to have virtual installations of Ubuntu and OpenSuse on my system. Can you people please suggest me from where to start, some good documentation, and not too technical. We are a Linux-User group, mainly teachers in profession. Thanking You </blockquote> Ok, I followed that wonderful guide, installed VirtualBox, and chose XP as my first Virtual Machine, but I was perplexed with "Virtual Hard Disk" menu. It seems that VM Wizard wants to create an "image", but my problem is, that I already have a multiboot setup with XP in it's own primary partition. The choices I have is to: 1) Create new hard disk 2) Use existing hard disk and then it has a drop down for `media' What exactly does it mean by choice (2)? Do I have to use the XP CD/DVD and create a NEW hard disk partition or what? What are my options? Thanks! Dan </blockquote> Take a look at section 4.1 or 4.2 in the manual I can't remember it exactly. Or search the mailing list as this has been discussed recently. To use an existing partition you create a .vmdk file using the command line, sorry no graphical method yet that I know of. You can add access to the whole disk (not recommended) or just to that single partition (recommended). Richard </blockquote> </div></div> I looked around for VirtualBox command line in the PDF manual and could not find it. However, I found this blog on how to do it, however, the showstopper for me was being able to create a file mbr such as winXP.mbr, which is a required step and this blog uses debian's mbr package (for Ubunto). Is there a Fedora equivilent for creating an mbr file? Here is the blog link on how to do it: <a href="http://mesbalivernes.blogspot.com/2008/01/virtual-box-booting-from-existing.html" target="_blank">http://mesbalivernes.blogspot.com/2008/01/virtual-box-booting-from-existing.html</a> If there is a better howto, please let me know?</blockquote></div> Sorry, I was WAY off... it section 9.10 in the user manual. The suggested method allowing only access to the partition is 9.10.2. My bad. Richard