New laptop question
 

Forgive me if this is in the wrong place, or considered to be a Windoze question (God forbid).

I'm currently an Ubuntu user and am thinking of going out and buying a new laptop. In common with most/all of us I'm not a big fan of Windoze but find I have to use it sometimes. My question is this: my intention is to buy a laptop, immediately make a Windoze System Restore disk and then reformat the HD installing Ubuntu and then using the Windoze System Restore disk to install the original copy of Windoze in a virtual machine. Can I achieve this with the Windoze Restore disk? Failing that, I have a copy of XP that I'll install in the VM instead.

MTIA

No - you can't do that.

you could use another copy of windoze, such as your XP, within that virtual disk

But:- you could also have some issues with the win_8 install & the uefi/bios issue.

if you can get a good second hand win_7 laptop, then go with that

Hi there,

This is probably more of a Windows than a Linux question, but as doing this promotes the use of Linux I'm sure nobody minds :-)

I've never tried this. A few thoughts, though:
* Whether and how this works probably varies between hardware vendors, as their recovery processes & software differ.
* Installing from a recovery disk is not the same as installing from a Windows CD, as the recovery usually first restores a recovery partition on your hard drive. This might make restoring to a VM a little tricky. I would also expect the recovery process to check the brand of hardware it is running on (for M$ licensing purposes), which would pose problems.
* If you do try this, I'd suggest you try and keep the recovery partition on the hard drive; don't destroy it when you install Linux.
* You will probably have better luck with an approach which creates an image of your installed Windows system & converts it to a VM. The best way to do this depends on the VM software you want to use, but there's some useful info at:
** http://askubuntu.com/questions/13390...irtual-machine
** https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=24445
** https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows
* Before you create such an image, it's probably a good idea to reduce the size of your Windows partition to the size you want for the VM (after creating your recovery disks of course)

While this might be a tricky/interesting exercise, there's little risk in trying it, as worst case scenario is you re-install Windows from the Recovery disks & try again:-) If you do try it, please post back to tell us how it went.

Regards,

Clifford

Thanks for that. I'll try and get one with Win7 on rather than 8, although I'm tempted by a Zoostorm model which comes with a high spec and no OS, thus resolving this issue.

What purposes do you use windows for? A lot of people use Windows for games and if that is the case using a VM is a bad idea, in fact doing anything that uses HW excelaration is a bad move. If you want to run some windows only applications at the same time as Ubuntu (and the program will not run [well] in wine, then VM is the way to go.

Dual boot is probably easier. You will need to resize you windows partition, the best tool (in my opinion) to do this is the parted magic live CD. I did this recently (~6 months ago) with a Win7 laptop. HP (the manufacturer), decided to use all 4 primary partitions which meant I had to delete a partion to make room. Luckily the machine came with an actual DVD restore disk (this is becoming rarer) so I could dump the restore partion on the HDD.

If you need Windows to run at the same time (i.e. in a VM) then you will have to get another copy of windows to install. Your WinXP should be fine. XP has some issues though, it is known that XP has some security issues (I don't want to go into Windows Vs. Linux security, but even in Windows world XP is considerd vunerable). You need to be carful with security in XP, and make sure your XP install is up to date. Running in a VM may mean you can reduce your online attack risk (do you need internet access on you VM'd XP machine). Also WinXP is EOLed real soon (April 8, 2014 acording to MS website for extended support, normal support has been gone for a while).

A quick google revealed this http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/ a tool for converting HDD installs (and other VM image formats) to a .vmdk image. I imagine simmilar tools exist for other VM platforms.


I am not recomending VMware just the first one I came to with google.

No, I'm not a gamer, I just need to run some Windoze stuff that won't run under wine. Dual boot is a possibility but as I prefer to actually work under Linux, concurrency is preferable.

Thanks for that. I use VirtualBox already but have no allegiances in that respect.

The problem with this approach is that the Windows installation will recognize that the underlying hardware has changed and may be refuse to work, but at least wants to be re-activated, which may be a problem with OEM versions.