Re: Booting Windows from Windows

On 10 Jun 2009 16:15:46 +0100 (BST), Theo Markettos
<theom+news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Once you've got a good install, you can use some sort of imaging
software to take a copy of it (dd in Unix, for instance!) and you can
always blast it back onto the partition like that.

I do have a clean Windows partition on the HD. But reimaging a partition on
the main HD that contains all my (Linux) data makes me a bit wary in case I
mess up and overwrite the wrong partition.

Always a mild risk when you're doing that sort of thing, true.

And it's much more faff to drag
16GB over the network than simply swap an SD card.

You can keep the image on the local machine, or on an SD card etc?

VMware will mount any USB devices directly to the VM, so that'll be
okay - I've updated mobile phone firmware and the like that way, not a
problem. PCMCIA I haven't tried, but I suspect it'll not be able to
see it directly.

Useful to know... that's the kind of thing I need to do.

I've checked up: PCMCIA is not "hosted" by any of the VM software, so
you cannot access such devices directly; you'd need the host OS to run
them, and for the VM software to know what they are and virtualise
them to the client. Which is fine for PCMCIA network cards and extra
physical ports, but not for more esoteric stuff.

Much of the stuff I need to do is
flaky at the best of times, so having a VM in the way would just be another
variable.

VM technology these days is very very reliable.

But if the VM doesn't support the particular hardware feature you need
(buried somewhere deep in the docs, no doubt), you'd spend ages fiddling and
wondering why it doesn't work.

No, they just won't be available at all. No fiddling, because there's
no passthrough.

won't it complain that I've copied it to what it thinks is a different
PC? So would I need another XP licence to run it in a VM? (I can get
another XP licence for free, so this isn't the end of the world).

No, that's not a new license, that's a reactivation after changing the
hardware. Different beast, usually works online without any trouble.
Although I've noticed that VMware at least seems to suppress
reactivation problems with the OS. Office 2007 gets pissy about
changed hardware though!

But if I want to run XP sometimes off the HD in native mode and sometimes in
a VM, that's two separate machines as far as MS is concerned, isn't it?

Yes, it is (except one special case which doesn't apply to you - on an
Apple, you can install XP native and also run it from OSX under VMware
or Parallels. The VM software does some serious rummaging under the
hood to avoid this triggering MS's activation routines). However,
there won't be any checking on hte part of Windows that it's only
running in one place.

Can
I use the OEM image from the recovery CD - is the check that I'm restoring
to a real laptop in the recovery program or in the OS? So can I take that
image and move to a VM (jumping through reactivation hoops), or will it
bleat that it's only for Toshiba laptops?

I believe the check - when it exists, which is rare but I've not used
Tosh lappies since the '90s - is usually during installation, so you
could indeed take the image and virtualise it.

I suspect the CompactFlash route is probably the simplest, given what you've
said above... bit of a pain if I need to use PCMCIA devices though (only
have one slot).

So that makes you as limited on the hardware front as using VM
software, which is a lot less hassle and quicker. Also free and very
little hassle, so well worth a try I'd say.

Another thought: How accessible is the hard drive in this laptop?
Thinkpads and many Dells have handy pullout drawers, you could simply
switch disks.

And a third alternative - run Windows, and put the Linux in the VM!
Run it full screen, you'll hardly be able to tell the difference -
unless, again, you need access to esoteric hardware.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
panic("Foooooooood fight!");
-- /usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi/aha1542.c
.

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