Virtualizing a running system

[warlord-DPNOqEs/LNQ at public.gmane.org (Derek Atkins)]

Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org> writes:

> This is interesting. A case where you have a native Windows partition
> that can either be booted native or via VMWare Workstation.
> BTW: Had one guy at the Installfest who had an old version of SuSE
> running on VMWare Workstation. After removing that virtual machine, I
> was unable to install SuSE 11, but I downloaded Virtualbox and was
> able to install SuSE 11.0 in under an hour.

I did this on previous laptops with older versions of Windows, but
XP and Vista make it MUCH much harder to do it.  In Win2k I had to
set up different hardware profiles and make sure I booted the correct
one.  It worked /pretty/ well, but if you screwed up the selected
hardware profile you could kill the machine.

> Virtualizatikon isn't a panaceia. For some reason, at the
> Virtualization deep Dive day I was able to pass USB into my Virtualbox
> version of Windows, but not at the Installfest. Since I had it working
> at VDD, I think it is just something in the VirtualBox configuration.

True, but it does solve lots of interesting problems.  I love that I can
create, install, setup, and deploy a new server machine at home from
1000 miles away!

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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