VirtualBox

Installation

Reference instructions can be found here:

• Add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list (here for Ubuntu Karmic):
deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian karmic non-free
• Add the Sun public key for apt-secure, then install

  wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/sun_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
  sudo apt-get install virtualbox-3.1
  

The group vboxusers is created during installation.

• Users of the VirtualBox must be member of that group. New users can be added with

sudo usermod -a -G vboxusers username

• The daemon for the network interfaces will be assigned to that group.

VirtualBox requires a kernel module vboxdrv.

• The default location of the module is given by setting KDIR=[fullpath] in file /etc/default/virtualbox.
• The kernel module can be compiled with

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

• Enable Dynamic Kernel Module Support to deal with Kernel Upgrade

Creating a New Virtual Machine

• To boot a Virtual Machine directly from a physical disk partitions, check the page on raw disks.

Booting Existing Windows XP from Physical Partition

Here I describe my attempt at booting the existing Windows XP partition on a Dell E6500.

• In Windows, created a 2nd hardware profile called Virtual, copy of the original profile Profile 1
• New VirtualBox machine:
  • Base Memory 1894MB
• Using raw disk only with partition /dev/sda2 doesn't work

sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename nxl670002-sda2.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda -partitions 2

This doesn't work! First Grub complained, then I tried to restore back the default WXP MBR (using either install-mbr or ms-sys but to no avail)

I created

• Virtual machine NXL670002
  • Base Memory 1894 MB
• Using raw disk with whole disk access/dev/sda

sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename nxl670002-sda.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda

This works, Windows boots!

• But hangs. In Safe Mode, it hangs after loading AGPCPQ.SYS.
• Some related posts:

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic21511.html

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=19847

http://forum.driverpacks.net/viewtopic.php?id=3865

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1330484

This post refers to problem with ACPI / APIC.

External references:

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=769883

Interesting post about step-by-step configuration to run an existing Windows XP installation.