This is a great thing to try and comes in handy if you still need to use Windows for those few things and want to find a way to do it without having to reboot over and over again.

Using VMware GSX its possible to create a virtual machine using a pre-existing windows disk/partition and boot that directly. Now I haven’t done any tests (yet), but if you try this and you see similar things let me know (comment), but I set this up and gave my Windows VM 800MB of ram. Now my machine has a total of 3GB ram but, and here’s whats really interesting. Loading my Windows XP VM seems 50x better speed wise then it does to boot into it directly without virtualization. Like I said I’ve not run any tests to confirm this but when it takes about a minute of the Windows XP is now loading screen compared to 10 seconds through the VM then it kinda gets you thinking. Taking into consideration the VM only has 800mb! and directly it has 3GB. Anyway, here’s how:

• Install XP on a disk seperate to linux or dual boot off the same disk (I have to seperate disks, grub sitting on the linux disk)
• Install VMware Server, in Ubuntu sudo apt-get install vmware-server
• Once installed go back to Windows and create a new hardware profile:
  
  • Click Start → Control Panel → System
  • On the Hardware tab, select Hardware Profiles
  • Click Copy, and call your new hardware profile VMware.
• Install the SCSI drivers (I didn’t do this initially, so when the VM would load Windows would just blue screen) http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp. You can extract the drivers using this http://america.winimage.com/download/winima80.exe. To install the drivers do the following:
  
  • Click Start → Control Panel → Add Hardware and step through the wizard
  • Tell Windows you’ve already connected the hardware.
  • On the next screen, there’s a list of installed hardware. Go all the way down to the bottom and choose Add a new hardware device.
  • Choose to Install the hardware that I manually select from a list.
  • Next choose SCSI and RAID controllers. After, that, click Have Disk… and navigate to the drivers you extracted with WinImage.Windows will install the VMware SCSI driver.
• Boot back into Ubuntu and start VMware Server Console from Application->System Tools
• Select Create A New Virtual Machine:
  
  • Select Custom
  • Select your version of Windows (in my case XP Professional)
  • Leave the name default unless you want to change it
  • Default for the processor (one)
  • Make private, up to you I normally uncheck this (I’m the only user on my PC anyway)
  • Select the amount of RAM you want to give the virtual machine
  • Bridged networking normally suites
  • Buslogic For the SCSI controller
  • Select Use a physical disk (for advanced users)
  • Now depending how you set this up disk or partition will determine what you select here. If Linux and Windows are on seperate disks and Windows is still bootable without grub you can just select the entire Windows disk otherwise select individual partitions and select your windows and linux parition
• After this you can customize the hardware of the VM if you like, remove floppy etc
• Start the VM and boot into windows making sure to select the VMware hardware profile
• Once loaded install the VMware tools, from the server console VM->Install VMware tools…
• Once done reboot and enjoy