VM setup from dual boot

[Lucio M Nicolosi]

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 2:46 AM, Sandy Harris <sandyinchina at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've got a machine that happily dual boots. Grub & most of Linux
> on sda, a solid state disk. Swap, XP and a few other things on
> sdb, a hard drive.
>
> I sometimes need XP, because my work involves editing Word
> files and OO does not handle all of them right. In particular, it
> has trouble with docx files and complex multi-column formats.
>
> Is there an easy way to get from where I am -- dual boot with
> a full XP install on sdb1 -- to a usable VM system? All the
> instructions I find assume you build the VM first, then put
> an OS on it.
>
> Ubuntu 10.10 on a fairly powerful machine. 3 GHz dual
> core, hyperthreaded so Linux things there are four, 8 gigs
> RAM, 19xx by 10xx graphics. My XP apps do not need
> much of that, maybe 512 megs, one core, 1024*768.

I have XP instances running on VMWare and VBox. Installing on VBox is
a piece of cake. With VMWare you can migrate your physical Windows OS
to virtual. Additionally XP runs faster on a virtual environment (on a
station like yours).



-- 
Lucio M. Nicolosi, Eng.
Open Source Implementation
System and Applications
GNU/Linux