Start Windows in virtual machine from real hard drive partion

Question

Is there any virtual machine under Linux which can start Windows (XP) from real hard drive partition, not from emulation image?

Answer 1

VMWare products can map physical disks to virtual disks, both on Linux and Windows:

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/glossary_ws.html#wp1018930

Physical disk

— A hard disk in a virtual machine that is mapped to a physical disk drive or a partition of a drive on the host machine. A physical disk is also referred to as a raw disk. A virtual machine's disk can be stored as a file on the host file system (see Virtual disk) or on a local hard disk. When a virtual machine is configured to use a physical disk, VMware Workstation directly accesses the local disk or partition as a physical device (not as a file on a file system). It is possible to boot a previously installed operating system on an existing partition within a virtual machine environment. The only limitation is that the existing partition must reside on a local IDE or SCSI drive.

Answer 2

In xen you can use the device and give it directly to your guest. You can use lvm:

disk        = [
                  'phy:/dev/volg1/thedisk,sda1,w',
                  'phy:/dev/volg1/theswap,sda2,w',
              ]

or directly a harddrve partition:

disk        = [
                  'phy:/dev/sda1,sda1,w',
              ]

you also can give a complete Disk to a guest, and let them partiton it:

disk        = [
                  'phy:/dev/sdb,sdb,w',
              ]

Answer 3

Easier: sudo qemu /dev/sdX will launch a virtual machine from an actual disk ;) qemu is free software, usually present in your distro's repositories

Answer 4

KVM and Xen can both do it -- you just point the VM at the physical partition.