Running Your Installed WindowsXP on Linux OS

Sorry if you can't understand my previous post. From now on I decided to make this blog English only, and if you prefer Indonesian, please visit http://blog.its.ac.id/antok.

Here is what u need:

• VirtualBox (>=1.4) installed.
• user that can run the VirtualBox virtualisation (included in the group : "vboxusers") and also a member of "disk" and "plugdev" group.
• Minimum RAM 256MB to be shared with the guest OS. This means that u must have >256MB RAM. I guess 512MB will be fine.
• No "agp440.sys" in the folder : :\Windows\System32\drivers. Please read this for details
• On this tutorial, hard drive is detected as "/dev/sda". Make adjustment according to your own system.

What U Should do Before U Begin :

• Create a System Restore Checkpoint and backup your data first.
• Most likely you will need to activate your Windows on the first run. It's a little annoying if u still want to boot your Windows system normally; u'll have to activate it again. And so on, and so on....
• I've experienced some difficulties on notebooks when I tried to boot my WindowsXP system again normally. The keyboard and mouse driver make the laptop's keyboard and touchpad freeze. This is when I use my System Restore.

Steps:

• As the user that already has the needed previleges, run this command on your favourite terminal :

$ VBoxManage internalcommands listpartitions -rawdisk /dev/sda

• Match the partition number with your WindowsXP partition.
• Enter the user's home folder, enter the ".VirtualBox" directory, make the directory "VDI", and enter it.
• Run this command on the "VDI" directory.

$ VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename file_name.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda -partitions 1,5 -relative -register

• 1,5 = the partition number that you want to include on your virtual system
• run VirtualBox, and make new profile with these specs :

OS_Type : Windows XP
Base memory size : min 256
Boot Hard disk : file_name.vmdk

• Please visit this website , find "boot disk image" and download it.
• Mount that ISO file that you've just downloaded, in your virtualBox profile.
• Try to boot your virtual system.
• If something goes wrong, try setting the IO-APIC feature (on your VirtualBox profile) on.

Have phun....
Indonesian version of this tutorial and some screenshots are available on this page.