Booting a native Windows install in Virtualbox: is it possible? [closed]

Solution 1:

It is possible to boot your Windows installed on your computer in a VM running on a Linux installed on the same computer. The only thing to remember: do not mount a partition on both OS. I've used this setup in qemu, kvm and VirtualBox.

EDIT: The ideea is to use the entire physical disk and be careful not to mount the same partition twice (like booting the same OS twice, or trying to mount a partition from an OS that was hibernated) VirtualBox setup:

• Create a VMDK file pointing to a raw disk: VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /path/to/file.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda -register See: http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#rawdisk
• create a new VM and use the raw disk for that VM.
• unmount all partitions that will be used by VM.
• boot the VM and in the Grub menu chose an OS that is not already booted.