Run Your Windows Partition Without Rebooting
November 13th, 2008 by Elliot Isaacson in
Dual booting is a necessary evil and very inconvenient. What if you could run your windows partition in a virtual machine, so you wouldn't have to worry about rebooting anymore? With VMWare Workstation, you can.
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December 2009, #188
If last month's Infrastrucuture issue was too "big" for you then try on this month's Embedded issue. Find out how to use Player for programming mobile robots, build a humidity controller for your root cellar, find out how to reduce the boot time of your embedded system, and if you're new to embedded systems find out the basics that go into one. You can also read about the Beagle Board, the Mesh Potato and a spate of other interestingly named items. And along with our regular columns don't miss our new monthly column: Economy Size Geek.
small issue
On January 29th, 2009 Mr. Joshua (not verified) says:
when i get to the grub menu to select an operating system, I can't arrow down to select windows xp pro, I ca hit c for a command line, but its like vm ware isn't recognizing the arrow keys, any ideas?
Insufficient permission to access file
On January 3rd, 2009 Glenn A (not verified) says:
I am running Ubuntu 8.04 and can't finish creating the VM. I get up to the last step in creating the VM but when i click finish if gives me this message "Insufficient permission to access file". i am creating the file in the default folder. I can create files and folders in that directory. any help or direction toward help would be appreciated.
Insufficient permission to access file
On March 7th, 2009 mmccullo says:
If you are using sudo to install the VM, you could try creating a bash shell as root and then running the installer
e.g.
malcolm@toshiba:~$ sudo bash
root@toshiba:~# ./VMware-Workstation6.5.1-126130.i386.bundle
cheers
-malcolm
P.S.
Great video and great idea I have used VMware but never thought of this
Hi Glenn I have the exact
On January 29th, 2009 mwl (not verified) says:
Hi Glenn
I have the exact same problem. Have you found a solution?
-Martin
VISTA?
On December 1st, 2008 GiNuX (not verified) says:
The instructions shown here do not work for Windows Vista as this OS does not include an obvious way to manage hardware profiles. Any comment Elliot? I mean apart from: why do you use Vista?, since this wasn't my choice.
I would like to know how to
On April 19th, 2009 Anonymous (not verified) says:
I would like to know how to do this with vista
Not a necessary evil
On November 25th, 2008 Harris (not verified) says:
Nice article however I do not agree that dual booting is required at all. I, personally, no longer find the need to dual boot. Used to do it a long time ago but only for games. But now, with a considerable number of games available on *nux and wine stabilizing as the days go by, having a windows partition is just a waste of space.
I had no idea this was even
On November 22nd, 2008 AndreiPaul (not verified) says:
I had no idea this was even possible until I saw the video.
Now I have something to do on my boring Sunday
Thanks
Andrei
Dual-booting is a necessary evil
On November 16th, 2008 derChef (not verified) says:
"Dual booting is a necessary evil"... Why? I thought Linux was so amazing, and offered so much freeeeedom, that you'd never need to use M$$$$ again, lest you be construed as hypocrites.
Other NTFS partitions
On November 15th, 2008 Kyle (not verified) says:
I have other NTFS partitions that I use on both systems... Do you believe I'll have to unmount those too in order to avoid corruption of data?
VirtualBox
On November 14th, 2008 Meião (not verified) says:
Recently I moved to my new apartment.
I couldn't get cable on my computer room, so I bought a wireless router and used my old wireless cards.
One of them (an Encore PCI) wouldn't run on Linux (no drivers). The other was kinda broken (but worked sometimes on Windows).
So I had to do the other way around, run Linux on VMWare that was running on win XP.
VMware had 2 troubles. X was only running at 800x600. I tried a workaround that didn't work (svga.maxWidth = 1280 ...).
And worse, the Ctrl + Alt is a VMware shortcut, so I would have to change my workspace shortcuts.
I gave up and tried VirtualBox. Worked great. It creates the partitions and configures the VM with a wizard and worked better on console (Debian installation was sluggy on VMWare).
Tip
On November 14th, 2008 Ian (not verified) says:
You can do all this with VMWare Server and it's free.
One scary moment when I tried this - Windows XP under VMWare needed to reactivate itself. This took a couple of attempts for me but now seems happy in the VMWare and booting live.
Or not...
On November 13th, 2008 Tim (not verified) says:
Great video, but why not use something that's open-source? Virtualbox, Xen, and kvm-qemu come to mind...
Speaking of Xen or kvm-qemu
On November 14th, 2008 Joe Tole (not verified) says:
Speaking of Xen or kvm-qemu (kvm is my fav), they also tend to run faster / more natively because they are using a hypervisor instead of some application which will provide you with, as I mentioned a faster VM to work with, especially if your processor supports virtualization which is almost all recent processors (AMD/Intel).
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