Running Ubuntu under Windows/running a Windows app under Ubuntu

[Eric Dunbar]

On 31/01/07, Ouattara Oumar Aziz <wattazoum at gmail.com> wrote:
> Eric Dunbar a écrit :
> > On 28/01/07, Akshay Lamba <akshay at lambaweb.com> wrote:
> > I'd primarily like to run the Intel box as an Ubuntu server, but
> > sometimes I'd like to be able to boot into Windows and run that same
> > server as a virtual machine in Windows.
> >
> > I'm going to play with VMWare Player under Windows and see if it'll
> > allow me to use a disk as the source of the operating system
> > (according to the Wikipedia entry VMware is able to do that _but_ that
> > entry didn't mention which VMware product would do that... not sure if
> > VMware Player will do that).
> >
>
> The product I knew that was able to do that was VMware workstation. In
> fact even VMware Player could do that. The only problem is to create the
> VM with the right configuration. For that job, only VMware Workstation
> or VMware Server can be used. EasyVMX can't .
>
> Another point is that the partition you will use to run the VM has to
> have a boot flag set.
>
> wattazoum
>
> PS: That feature is very *experimental* . It may cause you big problem
> with your disk. I don't recommend using that.

Basically what I'm trying to do is have a bare-bones Ubuntu server
system that I can run either under Ubuntu (95% of the time) or as a
virtual machine under Windows XP Pro.

Lets see if this scenario works:

I run my server as a virtual machine under VMware all the time.

95% of the time it'll run under Ubuntu as a VM, but, sometimes I'll
boot into Windows and run it there under VMware Player.

Question 1: can the Windows VMware Player run VMs created under Ubuntu
using the Ubuntu VMware?

Question 2: is it safe (as in data corruption/recovery) to keep my
shared files on a virtual disk (separate from the Ubuntu server
virtual machine)?

Thanks for your thoughts, Eric.