I am somewhat familiar with Qemu, VMware, and the like... but I am still stranded in dual-boot hell (at first I thought it was cool to dual boot... now I lament being stuck between two worlds) because I need to access my windows drive for key programs and files.

It's not that there isn't acceptable software for linux, it's just that I have to access my flash and premiere files and neither of those work in linux at all... wine or crossover included.

Question: Can I set up a virtualization solution, like Qemu, that will run my EXISTING windows partition? Or do I have to set up a new virtual windows?

EDIT: I just realized that it may be of some consequence to point out that my Windows XP installation is on a seperate HD. Both Linux and Windows get there own so Windows won't screw up my Linux

Thanks!

-Garrett

I'm afraid the answer is NO. You can't use the existing windows within qemu
(or vmware, to the best of my knowledge), because both solutions provide virtual
hardware to the guest OS, not the real thing. Your actual install would most
likely refuse to run from within an emulator that is completely different from
what it thinks it's installed on.


Cheers,
Tink

You may need a real virtualization setup. I expect to start experimenting with Xen shortly, but support for Windows on the free version appears to be a little iffy at this point. I suspect you will have to reinstall All your OSes, but I'm not sure. There is a an inexpensive commercial program, Parallells, that looks quite advanced. Might be something you'd be interested in. I believe that programs like VMWare, Wine, Cedega, etc. will shortly be rendered superfluous by this technology.