Running Windows 7 physical disk virtualized under Linux

Posted by CajunLuke on Super User See other posts from Super User or by CajunLuke
Published on 2011-01-12T04:20:10Z Indexed on 2011/01/12 4:55 UTC
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I have an existing Windows 7 installation that I'd like to virtualize under Linux. Windows boots fine on Disk A, Linux boots fine on Disk B. (Both disks are SATA.) I can mount the Windows disk when in Linux.

I've tried VirtualBox and VMWare Player and neither will allow me to boot from the other disk. VirtualBox doesn't seem to have the option to do so. VMWare Player has the option to have an IDE drive exposed to the virtual environment as a SCSI disk. I've tried that, but it throws the error "Cannot connect virtual device ide1:0 because no corresponding device is available on the host." I've verified that it's pointing to the correct hard drive.

I'm willing to try other virtualization products, and I'm not averse to spending a little money to get this to work.

I've seen this other question, and it's not a duplicate, as I haven't gotten that far yet. I'm also interested in solutions going the other way (Linux on Windows), but that'd be lagniappe.

Gory Hardware Details: Lenovo T410, 2.4 GHz Core i5 (has virtualization extensions), 4GiB RAM, 2x 320 GiB SATA HDD, one in optical bay. Fedora 14 2.6.35.10-74.fc14.x86_64, Windows 7 32-bit.

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