Is there any way to boot Windows 7 partition in virtual machine?

I have a dual boot machine with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Some time I need Windows 7 during my work. For that I reboot to Windows. It's not a way that I won't access NTFS partition. I need my Windows 7 environment sometime.

Is it possible to boot my Windows 7 partition in virtual machine in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS? That would break me from rebooting. I had heard about Xen and KVM virtual system but don't know how to use.

Any help to use Windows 7 partition on hard disk to boot in virtual box?

• Yes, both Virtualbox and VMWare virtual machines will boot from a physical partition provided they are started with the appropriate permissions (gksudo/sudo).

• The problem lies with Windows, in that its driver settings, particularly for storage devices, are not portable. Unless you modify the Windows registry to force start storage drivers for both the physical and virtual machines, you will mostly likely end up with a 0x0000007B STOP blue screen error each time which will require a restore or modifying the registry to fix.

See this guide for hints on how to do this and troubleshoot 0x7B errors if you want to try (it discusses physical-to-virtual conversions).