Booting into Windows from Linux

[Nevyn]

I've got a little project I want to have a play with but in order for
it to work (not that I'd use the functionality myself) I would need to
be able to boot into Windows from Linux in the same way that loadlin
allows you to go from dos into Linux.

Does anyone know how I might achieve this?

Regards,
Nevyn
http://nevsramblings.blogspot.com/

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[Nick Rout]

Post by Nevyn
I've got a little project I want to have a play with but in order for
it to work (not that I'd use the functionality myself) I would need to
be able to boot into Windows from Linux in the same way that loadlin
allows you to go from dos into Linux.
Does anyone know how I might achieve this?

qemu?
virtualbox?

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[Phillip Hutchings]

Post by Nevyn
I've got a little project I want to have a play with but in order for
it to work (not that I'd use the functionality myself) I would need to
be able to boot into Windows from Linux in the same way that loadlin
allows you to go from dos into Linux.
Does anyone know how I might achieve this?

Not really possible. Loadlin works because DOS is so very simple,
there's no memory protection. You'd have to use a virtual machine, so
KVM, VirtualBox or Qemu.

[Jaco van der Merwe]

"boot into"?
Well, there's 2 ways I know of:

* you can create a VBox "wrapper" around the physical win partition, but I'm now sure how usable the partition would be thereafter:
** http://www.bluemind.org/tips-a-tricks/9-linux/29-virtualbox-using-physical-bootable-partition.html
** http://dotneverland.blogspot.com/2008/08/running-your-physical-windows-xp.html
(this goes back a stretch, so I'm not sure how valid it still is)

* you can mod you grub, so that you effectively boot into your linux OS & then throw it back to the other disk.
you can use the various (grub2) tools (think it's update-grub) to probe the other partitions & config the loader to provide them as options at boot.
** https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

hope this helps

- J

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[Phillip Hutchings]

Post by Jaco van der Merwe
** http://www.bluemind.org/tips-a-tricks/9-linux/29-virtualbox-using-physical-bootable-partition.html
** http://dotneverland.blogspot.com/2008/08/running-your-physical-windows-xp.html
(this goes back a stretch, so I'm not sure how valid it still is)

Windows 7 is nicer, but you need to watch out for AHCI vs IDE vs SCSI
emulation. Windows really doesn't like changing that. Win7 is much
better than XP in that regard, but it's still a pain. Also if you
frequently change between virtualisation and physical then get used to
'Found new device!'