Virtualizing XP with dual boot FC10/XP

[Bill Davidsen]

Hal Meyer wrote:
> I have FC10 and Windows dual booted on my PC and would like to
> virtualize XP with KVM. 
> 
> I want to be able to both boot to XP and also virtualize it in FC10
> (obviously not at the same time).
> 
When you boot, do you come up in a boot manager? If you tune your grub to do a 
highly visible boot setup, like 15 sec wait and hidmenu commented out, you could 
try this:

   qemu-kvm -m 512 -hda /dev/sda

and just select the XT partition to boot.

Note: I do not have a way to test this, and I sure wouldn't let it accidentally 
boot the Linux partition, but I don't see a reason why it would do serious harm 
if it failed. Usual stuff said about backups and all...

> When I try to install a new virtual machine the process wants to install
> XP from the CD. Is there a way to just point to the XP partition on the
> disk?
> 
No, you want a disk image. And I wouldn't let any install program touch this 
unless it actually said it could do such a thing. The manual run above should at 
least give you a feeling for the possibilities.

> Vmware workstation claims to be able to do this but there seem to be
> other issues with vmware and FC10.

I have seen discussion, VMware will work fine with FC10 after it has a chance to 
be tuned, but probably isn't a good choice now.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot