running windows partition in ubuntu

Question

I am not quite sure this can be done. I have a dual boot server with xp and ubuntu - each on their own drive. is there any way to use virtual box or something similar to run the xp OS a guest to ubuntu - that is already installed on the other physical drive than ubuntu is installed?

Comments

I don't think you can do that, at least I haven't seen a way to.

Answer 1

No, you cannot run it from a disk that way, but you could copy XP's disk into a VM, which runs from a virtual disk that is located on the old drive.

Simply put, you basically clone the XP system as a file somewhere, erase the drive, set it up for use with Virtualbox, and then copy the clone back into the VM.

Again, that's the short version. It's not a trivial procedure, but it can be done.

Comments

The question is if it was possible to transform an existing XP installation into a virtual machine:

Answer 2

I like to do things manually, but there is at least one utility to help you as well:

"virt-p2v converts physical machines to run on KVM. virt-v2v converts virtual machines from Xen and VMware hypervisors to run on KVM."

Luckily for you, Windows XP is a bit easier to move to new hardware, or in this case, to virtual hardware. And there are a couple of ways to repair XP if it fails to boot on the new hardware.