VM?

[marbux]

On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 9:27 PM, Terry Klarich <terry at klarich.net> wrote:
> Does anyone know if it is possible to run a guest OS from it's own partition?  I would like the best of both worlds.  It would be
> nice to bring up windows with out rebooting.  Othere times, it would be nice to devote the entire machine to windows such as when I
> am converting aa files to mp3's.

The guest OS "partition" (actually a giant file) can be located on a
separate physical drive partition. But the host OS must be operating
in order to run the guest OS.

On the other hand, you can have a system that is dual-boot and runs a
VM from one or both of the host systems. The big limitations are: [i]
available disk space; and [ii] Microsoft licensing policy enforced by
Windows calling-home features that might get in the way of having two
instances of Windows installed without buying a second license. The
problem is that the virtual machine's "partition" will show in the
call-home validation procedures as a different drive -- a SCSI drive
-- from the partition on which Windows is not a guest. So Windows
Genuine Advantage I think would refuse to validate both installations.

Your best solution might be to run Windows as the host and run Linux
as the virtual machine guest. That way you can dual boot the Linux OS
as well, dealing Windows Genuine Advantage out of the game. When you
want to run Windows alone, just shut down the virtual machine. If you
want to run Linux alone, reboot and load Linux.

Another consideration is the amount of RAM you have available. I
wouldn't advise running a virtual machine with less than a gigabyte of
RAM. More is better although as I recall Windows can't do anything
with more than three gigabytes or so. And if you're running Windows as
the host, it can't pass more than what Windows can access through to
the virtual machine. On the other hand, RAM is dirt cheap these days
and when you reboot into Linux rather than running it virtually, Linux
can take advantage of far more RAM than Windows. .

Hope this helps, The above may contain errors. I'm far from an expert
on virtual machines.

Paul

-- 
Universal Interoperability Council
<http:www.universal-interop-council.org>