Howto boot directly into a VirtualBox image?

Posted by mawimawi on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by mawimawi
Published on 2011-01-12T11:19:42Z Indexed on 2011/01/12 11:55 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 235

Filed under:

native-mode

I have a running setup as following:

Native OS: Windows 7 64bit, 3 Partitions:
- c: (System)
- d: (FAT32, here is my vdi file)
- e: (unformatted)
VirtualBox: Fedora 14 running off the vdi file on drive d.

Usually this setup is great for me, but sometimes I'd like to run Linux natively, and not inside VirtualBox.

Is there a way to boot directly into the vdi file without the Windows overhead? E.g. using a USB stick with some modified Linux Kernel / GRUB that can mount the vdi file directly as "/"? Or copy the contents of my vdi file to the empty partition and somehow use this from VirtualBox (when booting into Windows) AND directly booting into Linux?

Hope to get some hints or even howtos.

Howto boot directly into a VirtualBox image?

Posted by mawimawi on Super User See other posts from Super User or by mawimawi
Published on 2011-01-12T09:57:44Z Indexed on 2011/01/12 13:55 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 235

Filed under:

native

|

virtualbox

I have a running setup as following:

Native OS: Windows 7 64bit, 3 Partitions:
- c: (System)
- d: (FAT32, here is my vdi file)
- e: (unformatted)
VirtualBox: Fedora 14 running off the vdi file on drive d.

Usually this setup is great for me, but sometimes I'd like to run Linux natively, and not inside VirtualBox.

Is there a way to boot directly into the vdi file without the Windows overhead? E.g. using a USB stick with some modified Linux Kernel / GRUB that can mount the vdi file directly as "/"? Or copy the contents of my vdi file to the empty partition and somehow use this from VirtualBox (when booting into Windows) AND directly booting into Linux?

Hope to get some hints or even howtos.

EDIT: yes, sorry. not programming related. I posted the question to serverfault.com (hopefully that's the better site for my question.)

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