It seems easy, no?
You have a dualboot installation, and want to boot the 1 operating system into the other as a guest.
So, first you’ll have to install a hypervisor on the host, for example vmwareΒ workstation .
Second, you want to access the phyiscal disk. So you configure vmware like that, but it appears nothing works…
I’ll save you some trouble: vmware won’t be able to boot your windows…
This because of 2 reasons:
- the host operating systems locks the bootloader, so you can’t start that one (this can be overcome by using another bootloader)
- vmware mounts disk with virtual scsi interfaces… Your windows is not expecting that…(Or you should find a way to use sata instead of scsi drives, I didn’t actually searched for it. I just used virtualbox, which passes trough the sata-interface)
I managed to get it working using vmware workstation to create the vmdk file, plop to boot the operating system, and oracle’s virtualbox to run it all as a guest operating system!
First of all, download & install the vmware workstation trial (you’ll need this just a couple of minutes)
I needed welltal’s patch to run vmware on the newest linux 3.3 kernel. I needed to edit the .sh-file it as well to remove some checks because I had a even newer version of the kernel, 3.3 instead of 3.2, and vmware 8.0.4 instead of 8.0.3 .
Apparently they have a never version of the patch as well: just have a look around on welltal’s blog and you’ll figure it out π
Next: create a new guest, add a new hard disk, and choose the option to use a physical disk.
Now you can throw vmware awayΒ π
Second part, download & install virtualbox.
Create a new guest, and use the disk you just created in vmware.
You can use this to access the physical partition on your disk.
Now you’ll probably get an error from grub because the running host operating system locks the bootloader.
This is where plop comes in.
Download the iso from the site and mount it in your virtualbox.
Reboot the guest, and watch how plop boots π
(You’ll have to keep this iso mounted permanently, because this will boot your windows)
You’ll need to start the partition on which your windows is installed.
In my case, it’s partition 1…
Press enter and watch how windows boots π
And that’s how you can enjoy Linux yet a little more π