Booting a linux partition as dedicated, as well as virtual?

[Fzang]

I was wondering if I could either create a dedicated or a wubi partition and then boot it through VMware or VirtualBox inside windows? I'm not using linux for actual work... more like customization and exploring. Also, it's a laptop so suspend/hibernate doesn't always work as one might want and a VMs suspend option would be godlike for me

[dcstar]

I was wondering if I could either create a dedicated or a wubi partition and then boot it through VMware or VirtualBox inside windows? I'm not using linux for actual work... more like customization and exploring. Also, it's a laptop so suspend/hibernate doesn't always work as one might want and a VMs suspend option would be godlike for me

I know VMware Server VMs can access "real" partitions, but it is not recommended because then you have the potential situation of two OSs having access to the same files when all OSs expect sole access to these things.

There are posts in this forum (and many others, I expect) where people have stuffed up things in a major way by doing this sort of thing.