dual boot win XP and fedora + VMware virtual server with the same file system
 

Hi guys,

I was just wondering if anything like this would even be possible to put in practice.

What I would like to have, is an dual boot system with Win XP and Fedora Core 6 and, on the Win XP operating system, to have installed a VMware virtual server, that would use the same file system as the Linux operating system on the HDD Linux partition.

I'm interested if anyone has any background with anything similar and, if anyone has any idea if it's possible, and if yes, how, to make the virtual machine run from the linux partition.

titel

Dual booting XP and Linux is a no-brainer. Load up XP, then Linux and you will be prompted if you want to dual-boot. Very easy. However, XP can't read Linux partitions out of the box. If I read you right, you want to be able to run VMs in either XP or Linux, depending on which one is booted? In that case, I reckon you should create a seperate partition in either FAT32 or NTFS (if you load ntfs-3g in your Linux install) and put your VM files on there.

What I actually wanted to do, is to either start the Linux OS by itself, or, when the Win is already started, to run the same installation of Linux inside a VMware virtual server.

Do you think I'll be able to achieve this the same way you were proposing?

titel

I for one don't know what the question is all about.

There is no dual boot if you use VMware.

Linux and XP use different filing systems but you can mount the filing system of one in the other to read and write. Linux has ntfs-3g and XP has Ext2ifs to do just that.

VMware is attached to a host system so you can install it say in XP. After that every Linux installed is just a "guest" to the host. A guest cannot be booted separately. You always boot to the host and run the guest systems "inside" the host by allocating a portion of the memory to each guest. The boot loaders of the guest systems are simply not installed and if they are none of them are used in practice. As far as I know a guest system is an isolated system that cannot be mounted as an ordinary Linux. It is only accessible via the host system and stored as one huge file.

So you want to have Linux and Windows installed in a dual-boot config, but then also boot the Linux build inside a VM in Windows? No I'm pretty sure that's not possible. Not 'real-time' anyway. I mean you could build your dual boot system, use a P2V (physical to virtual) converter to turn it into a VM you could run in Windows. But when you made changes in one, it wouldn't automatically be reflected in the other.