When Vista comes out

[John Jay Smith]

I never said the os would be running with that same partition...
I never said 2 different machines...
you misunderstood my question... anyway.. .

we are not getting anyware with this so Ill drop it and ask elseware...

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

What you asked was,

"Can you load an existing partition for example windows or linux that is
nomally dual boot from within a virtual machine while another os is loaded?"

I understand terminology can be difficult sometimes, so what did you mean to
ask? How about an example?

 

[Travis King]

Activation Question:
If let's say you have an NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti200 on XP. Let's say later you
put in an NVIDIA GeForce4 MX4000. Now activation has it as 'flagged' for
your video card. Now what about if you don't like the MX4000 a week later
and put your NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti200 back in the computer. Will activation
leave your video card as 'flagged' or will it go back to 'unchanged'?

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

The flag for the video adaptor is only set once. It will not change again
until reactivation is triggered no matter how many different videocards you
try. What is recorded is that a change has been made in that particular
hardware characteristic since activation, not how many times it has changed.

 

[John Jay Smith]

Ok you have a dual boot... windows and linux ok?

You can of course load either windows or linux.

Now say you boot into windows. Is there any possible way
(and if it does not exist perahaps it should be created),
to load the OTHER partition (that is the linux),
with a Virtual machine window from inside windows?

So that way you would not have to reboot again to get into linux.

and lets take it the other way around.. you boot in linux...
could you somehow load the existing partition of windows
from within a virtual machine program on linux?

I am not saying here that any partition will be loaded twice...

One is loaded normally and the other is loaded from within a virtual
machine.

Why would someone want to do such a thing?
Because you have more flexibily by combining 2 ways of loading each os.
As a normal boot, OR as a virtual machine....


I hope I explained it better this time....

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

No. VPC is not a boot manager. It is a virtual machine manager.

What prevents you from doing as you describe is that a virtual machine
running under VPC cannot go to the boot sector on a physical hard drive and
boot an OS directly from a partition on the host's hard drive. It cannot
even see any of the hardware on the host computer. The hard drive(s) it
sees are simply big data files stored on the host. VPC knows where these
files are but the vm does not.

VPC has its own set of emulated hardware, except for memory and the cpu.
The cpu is virtualized and the memory is allocated from the overall system
memory. The rest of the hardware a vm uses is emulated hardware. All of
this is managed by VPC such that each vm has no idea that it is not the only
OS running on the computer.

What you can do is create an image of the other system partition and use the
image to create a new virtual machine (just as you might with a real
computer). But in this scenario it is easier just to install the Linux
distro into a new virtual machine. The whole idea of VPC is to get rid of
dual booting in the first place. You use a vm instead of dual booting, not
to manage dual booting.

The cases where you would still want to dual boot instead of virtualizing
Linux would be where the work you are doing requires access to the host's
hardware (high end graphics or media content creation, for example). A vm
can only use the highly standardized emulated hardware provided by VPC, and
that emulated hardware is not very capable when it comes to specialized
audio or video work.

For a good read on virtualization and emulation see:
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2004/10/18/243821.aspx

There are important advantages to having standardized hardware for vm's
(such as portability). For some of the reasoning behind the choices of
emulated hardware see:
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2005/01/26/361361.aspx

 

[Bernie]

Ok you have a dual boot... windows and linux ok?

You can of course load either windows or linux.

Now say you boot into windows. Is there any possible way
(and if it does not exist perahaps it should be created),
to load the OTHER partition (that is the linux),
with a Virtual machine window from inside windows?

So that way you would not have to reboot again to get into linux.

and lets take it the other way around.. you boot in linux...
could you somehow load the existing partition of windows
from within a virtual machine program on linux?

I am not saying here that any partition will be loaded twice...

One is loaded normally and the other is loaded from within a virtual
machine.

Why would someone want to do such a thing?
Because you have more flexibily by combining 2 ways of loading each os.
As a normal boot, OR as a virtual machine....


I hope I explained it better this time....

I think you did as now I think I know what you want. I know next to
nothing about VMs so am not qualified to answer. But it is an
interesting idea.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

With VPC you can create a base vm (called a parent), lock it, and use
differencing disks Icalled children) which allow you to modify the system
without writing the changes to the reference vm (called the parent). There
can be many children so you could set up a lab this way. The students can
whack the system and the instructor can still maintain a stable base.

VPC also has a feature called Undo Disks which allow you to just discard the
changes to the vm for a session. This is ideal for presenters, and for
developers and testers who routinely screw things up and need to get back to
a stable system easily.

Want to try out some configurations in Linux? Great. If you mess things up
just discard the undo disk and try again.

 

[Bernie]

Colin Barnhorst wrote:

What you can do is create an image of the other system partition and use the
image to create a new virtual machine (just as you might with a real
computer). But in this scenario it is easier just to install the Linux
distro into a new virtual machine. The whole idea of VPC is to get rid of
dual booting in the first place. You use a vm instead of dual booting, not
to manage dual booting.

As I understood it this is the thing John wants and I think it would be
interesting too. But I think perhaps the way to go is via a product like
mkdistro. The idea is to have a working installation that has been
tweaked in all the right places and convert that into a bootable image.

My experience of virtual machines is quite limited. I saw a guy at a
Microsoft seminar using a laptop with several VMs. I tried it myself but
only had a low spec machine to put it on at the time and the performance
was not very good with the limited RAM available and that kind of put me
off.

The cases where you would still want to dual boot instead of virtualizing
Linux would be where the work you are doing requires access to the host's
hardware (high end graphics or media content creation, for example). A vm
can only use the highly standardized emulated hardware provided by VPC, and
that emulated hardware is not very capable when it comes to specialized
audio or video work.

For a good read on virtualization and emulation see:
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2004/10/18/243821.aspx

There are important advantages to having standardized hardware for vm's
(such as portability). For some of the reasoning behind the choices of
emulated hardware see:
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2005/01/26/361361.aspx

Thanks for the refs and the explanation.

 

[Bernie]

With VPC you can create a base vm (called a parent), lock it, and use
differencing disks Icalled children) which allow you to modify the system
without writing the changes to the reference vm (called the parent). There
can be many children so you could set up a lab this way. The students can
whack the system and the instructor can still maintain a stable base.

VPC also has a feature called Undo Disks which allow you to just discard the
changes to the vm for a session. This is ideal for presenters, and for
developers and testers who routinely screw things up and need to get back to
a stable system easily.

Want to try out some configurations in Linux? Great. If you mess things up
just discard the undo disk and try again.

Okay it does sound intriguing. Guess I'll have to check it out.