[olug] Best Way to upgrade computer

[Daniel Linder]

On Sat, November 3, 2007 23:47, Joe Gulizia wrote:
> Can I do this with Win XP on one hard drive and
> Kubuntu 7.10 on the other drive?  Unfortunately it
> does need to have Win on it.

A long time ago (back in the Win 98 era), I had something like this setup.
 I ran Linux as my primary OS, and then let VMWare boot Win98 from the
second partition.  On the odd occasion that I had to run something in
Win98 that didn't like the VMWare environment (i.e. needed all the RAM, or
had to access the hardware directly), then I would just reboot.

The good thing is that WinXP does auto-detect hardware changes and will
automatically load the correct settings.  You might have to play with
hardware profiles a bit to make it happy.

The bad thing is that some software insists on accessing the hardware at a
lower level than VMWare lets it (i.e. some DVD/CD writer drivers).  In
those instances, you might have to boot back into Windows.

Your first big decision will be deciding which OS is the host (i.e. the
primary OS), and which is the guest (the one inside the virtual machine).

1: Install the primary OS to the first HDD.
2: Boot from the secondary OS install CD and install to the second HDD.
3: Boot back into the primary OS and install VMWare.
4: Configure a new VMware guest to use and boot from the second HDD ("Use
a physical disk" and "use entire disk").
5: Configure the two different hardware profiles within the second OS to
account for different drivers (VMWare video driver vs. the video card in
the system, etc).
6: Enjoy! ;-)

Dan

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