Ubuntu/Vista Dual Boot With a Twist! - Virtual PC in ubuntu booting existing Windows Partition! (exp ins.)

May 9, 2008 11:08 PM

Ubuntu/Vista Dual Boot With a Twist! - Virtual PC in ubuntu booting existing Windows Partition?

last week i posted this askMe and have now decided to achieve the following setup:

1. Two partitions 1 with vista and 1 with Ubuntu
2. In the ubuntu parition have a program like (Virtualbox, VMware) which will boot up from the EXISTING vista partition on the computer.

My reasoning for this is to use Ubuntu as my main OS, use the virtual vista for non cpu intensive tasks and then load up in vista natively for cpu intensive tasks.

However I will only have vista installed once on my computer saving space, and allowing programs and files to be shared between the "two" vistas.

My Question:

Do you guys know any guides/resources/anything i could consult on how to do this? I have posted on the ubuntu forums but no one has really given me any good help. I tried following a random guide on the internet on my desktop computer and all I ended up doing was corrupting the MBR in my virtual machine. I guess part of the problem is also the fact that a lot of these linux howtos just tell you to copy paste things into your terminal and I have no idea what they are doing. Maybe a site that actually explains these things and what each individual line does would also be helpful. Every guide I have seen so far seems to do something different.

P.S i would prefer to use VirtualBox to do this since it seems to be the thing everyone seems to be using now :/. If VMWare is better i guess I would do that too however. Also I know you can access files from your vista partition in Ubuntu since it can read and write to nfts but is there a way to get vista to read/write ubuntu ext3 (i think) files?

posted by Javed_Ahamed to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Trying to boot a Vista partition both natively and from VMware is not going to work. VMWare's emulated machine, hardware-wise, will differ from your actual machine. Even if Vista is able to sort out the driver issues inherent in switching back and forth from two logically different machines (not likely), the "windows genuine advantage" licensing thing is going force you to re-activate Vista on every switch because Vista will believe you have installed it on a diffrent computer. There's a limit (3?) on the number of times you can do this reactivation before you need to call a 1-800 number and convince someone in an Indian call center to let you reactivate; I know, because I had to do this after I changed my virtual Vista's machine's virtual memory allocation.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 11:41 PM on May 9, 2008

If you're having trouble making hyperlinks on Metafilter, and screwing up your MBR on your desktop, maybe you ought to slow down on designing complicated cross boot schemes for your laptop.

That said, virtualization of Vista doesn't help you if you've got network hardware from Broadcom, or other reason to have to run hacks like ndiswrapper. ndiswrapper is enough of a kludge, that just booting to Ubuntu will seem exotic, to say nothing of getting stuff like fingerprint pads and exotic video hardware some modern laptops have to work. And given Vista's needs, it's unlikely you'll get a virtualized install to ever run real hardware, if that hardware is other than bog standard stuff. A VMware virtual machine does not look to Vista, like the real machine underneath, which may be good, if the real machine has lots of Vista only features.

So if you want to run Ubuntu native, and Vista on a virtual machine there in, install Vista that way. And if you want to run Vista native, with Ubuntu in a virtual machine under Vista, install another set up that way. You're only talking about a few additional GB of disk space, even if you have both systems virtualized in the other.

Maybe put an additional, common data partition on there, to keep your OS partitions from holding data.

And don't screw up your recovery partition.
posted by paulsc at 11:52 PM on May 9, 2008 [2 favorites]

I did warn you about Microsoft's overzealous EULA enforcement mechanisms, didn't I?

Personally I think there's a really strong argument that running one instance at any time of the same Windows installation on the same physical hardware does comply with the terms of the EULA, regardless of whether or not there's a layer of virtualization software between Microsoft's kernel and the underlying hardware.

However, Microsoft's technical EULA enforcement mechanisms will treat this setup as if you're booting the same Windows installation on two different computers, will phone this situation home to the mothership, and will require you to reactivate every time you switch environments. Eventually the call centre people will notice what you're doing and refuse to help you do it. In effect, Microsoft makes it impracticable for you to choose this way to conform to the EULA.

There are various ways you can work around this. None of them are pretty.

If I was going to do it (and I'm not, because I'm a Linux fanboi largely because I object to wasting my time and money on this kind of licensing foolery) I would pay for two Windows licenses and perform two installations as paulsc suggests. Immediately after the second installation, I'd use the SysInternals NewSID tool to copy the machine SID from the first installation to the second one. Then I'd be careful to add user accounts to the second installation in precisely the same order I added them to the first one, so that user Javed_Ahamed on installation 2 ends up with the same user SID as Javed_Ahamed on installation 1. Then I'd reassign all my special folders on the second installation to point to the corresponding folders on the first one. This is all a huge pain in the arse, and tends to be a little fragile. As far as I know, the other alternatives are worse.

There are various ext2 plugins available for XP. I've used this one before; don't know how good the Vista support in the current version is. Be aware that because Windows and POSIX have such different security models, accessing a foreign filesystem will, in general, not support access restrictions.
posted by flabdablet at 2:32 AM on May 10, 2008

Be warned. Backup everything first. Messing with raw disk support and getting it wrong will most likely destroy all data in one or both OSes.

As qxntpqbbqxl says, the DRM on vista is going to nail you. With an older version of windows, this would work, though not great. You can install the vmware or virtual box drivers in the windows install so it doesn't choke on the hardware change booting natively or via raw disk support under vmware. Windows XP VLK would work for this; OEM vista with only one hardware fingerprint activation allowed, not so much.

Assuming you go with virtualbox:

First boot into Windows. There, run the MergeIDE utility as explained here. Then, create a new hardware profile (right-click on My Computer -> Properties -> Hardware tab -> Hardware profile), name the profiles Native and Virtualbox. Now boot into linux. Follow the VirtualBox User Manual to create a virtual machine with raw disk access, point it at your windows partition and start it. When asked while loading windows in virtualbox, select the VirtualBox profile.When Windows is activated and finishes loading, install VirtualBox Additions. You're done.

Now you can either boot into Windows natively or start it from VirtualBox, just select the appropriate hardware profile.

You can gain read/write access to ext3 partitions from windows, with some caveats. (Ext3 is Ext2 + journalling - more of that in the faq)

I would personally strongly recommend instead dualbooting vista and ubuntu, with just a mini clean virtual xp install in ubuntu for the handful of apps you need (much smaller and lighter than vista) and a third shared FAT32 partition that both OS'es can easily read for sharing data. between both real OSes and the virtualised one.

As for virtualbox vs vmware server; they're both good in different ways. Try em both, they're free, see which you prefer in terms of speed.
posted by ArkhanJG at 2:39 AM on May 10, 2008

Also, don't forget you can remap the 'my documents' folder on windows to a different location; it's a cheap and pretty easy way for different copies of windows on the same machine to share user settings, documents etc for a specific user. I point to the 'my documents' folder on a separate hard-drive for my dual-boot setup, so wiping one copy doesn't wipe out my setups and docs, only the installed apps. You'll probably want the same version of windows on real hardware and virtual in this setup though.
posted by ArkhanJG at 2:47 AM on May 10, 2008

First boot into Windows. There, run the MergeIDE utility as explained here. Then, create a new hardware profile (right-click on My Computer -> Properties -> Hardware tab -> Hardware profile), name the profiles Native and Virtualbox. Now boot into linux. Follow the VirtualBox User Manual to create a virtual machine with raw disk access, point it at your windows partition and start it. When asked while loading windows in virtualbox, select the VirtualBox profile.When Windows is activated and finishes loading, install VirtualBox Additions. You're done.





Arkan i tried doing what you said along with This Guide.... actually i basically verbatim followed that guide....

I was doing this on a test computer which has windows xp and ubuntu on it.

but when i start my windows xp virtual machine It just says MBR or MBR FA: ... any ideas? or is anything needed not mentioned in that guide?
posted by Javed_Ahamed at 12:55 PM on May 10, 2008

See here and here.

I just did this a few days ago - it works pretty well, but if you have 2 OS's accessed on the same hard drive at the same time, don't expect blazing speed and performance out of Windows.
posted by juicedigital at 12:32 PM on May 11, 2008

Yes juicedigital that was the thread i was using to do all this but it isnt working, from page 3 to 4 i have some posts explaining my problem and different things i have tried... and actually now i have a whole new problem....
posted by Javed_Ahamed at 1:23 PM on May 11, 2008