I have a laptop running a linux OS(Fedora) at my father house, and have an external ~450Gb harddrive used to store files and trip photos, etc. He has a GM based ETK/PET type windows XP based program that was previously installed on the computer before Fedora, but now doesn’t run due to the OS.
Is it possible to partition the external HD and install windows XP on the partition so I can install and run this program while it’s linked to the Fedora OS laptop as an external drive, or will there be complications between the two OS recognizing each other?
I’ve never partitioned a drive before either, and would need some good info on doing this as well(if aformentioned is possible). The only other PC he has is a macbook my sister gave him when she upgraded overseas. I know jack squat about macs.
I don’t fuck with it to much, AMD IS BEST, would probably know better. I’m sure you could use a program like WINE (Windows emulation) to get it running. If not as long as the laptop supports booting from a USB device you could more than likely install XP on a partition on the external drive.
Step 1) Install Oracle VirtualBox (I believe they have Linux Support)
Step 2) Install XP Virtual Machine onto Linux Hard Drive using VirtualBox
Step 3) Profit
It’s obviously more indepth than that, but it’ll get you started in the right direction.
FYI as far as I know, you can not boot windows externally/via usb. I have my old laptop hard drive with windows on it and I’ve looked for ways to just run off of that HD and I’ve found nothing about it. Good luck.
Virtual Machines are the new technology guys. A lot of servers in many companies are being consolidated on a daily basis down to be virtual (you can have one powerful server run 3 ‘servers’ for example instead of having 3 separate boxes).
Check out Oracle VirtualBox for sure.
If you need help setting it up, let me know. Otherwise, you’re welcome.
Word of advice if you do end up using VB. Make snapshots every few weeks. And also, make sure you have a decent amount of space on your hard drive. My current XP image which I use in ‘sandbox’ mode of sorts (if I’m search for software, many software sights have viruses) takes up about 8GB. I have it set to dynamic so it takes up as much as it needs.
I didn’t say anything about a virtual machine. All I said was you can’t take a hdd out of a windows machine, hook it up via usb, and boot to windows from that drive.
In this case I would just use VMware. I can supply you with a pre-installed XP Pro VMware image and you can just install the client, open the image and errything should be gravy.
Why not? You certainly can. But- with all the nice VM-related stuff nowadays, there’s no reason to really. Just import the hard drive image into a vm environment and, voila, host a copy of your original computer in a virtual environment- without even popping out a drive.
The only bad part is that when you realize you computer/laptop is lacking on resources and hosting a vm is a little more than your machine is capable of. That sucks.
vmware is badass, when its done properly. I manage a 150+ virtual server cluster here at work. All those machines run on 8 physical boxes and a 9terabyte SAN. Ours is dumpy though, we have the yugo of VM setups.
I would first install wine and see if your software will run on that. That’d be the quickest and easiest way to get it up and working (granted it works). If that’s a fail, I second the virtual box idea. Check here: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads to obtain it for your distro (Fedora). It is also very easy to set up a dual boot but it’s much easier to do that when you can start from scratch and windoze should be installed first.
If you need help with wine or any of it, let me know!
Works quite well on a Dell Mini 9. I had Snow Leopard on mine @ 1g RAM / 4gb SSD. I had to install to an external, OSX shrink the bitch and copy it to my SSD in order to get it under 4gb. Later, I upgraded it to 2gb RAM/ 32gb SSD and it worked great until the SSD died.
