Virtualbox to Boot Wubi inside Windows

[mbeichorn]

This is a poorly understood subject with no apparent documentation...

I am attempting to use Virtualbox on Windows to boot up a Wubi install of Jaunty I believe that it is possible as I have come across a smattering of posts saying it is possible and has been done. I want the flexibility of being able to boot solely into Ubuntu or Windows but still being able to call the other up as a VM without rebooting. Does anyone actually know how to accomplish this feat?

For the record:
Colinux & varients are not possible as I require an amd64 OS for hardware reasons.
I spent several hours doing research but only found instructions for Ubuntu hosting a Win partition in VBox.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=769883

I am also open to partitioning Ubuntu separately, but would prefer to keep it as Wubi.
I could also survive if it was VMware and not VirtualBox.

[Scotty Bones]

I'm not sure if what you are attempting to do is possible.

However, this entry in the VB user manual might be of some use.
9.10.2 Access to individual physical hard disk partitions (p135)

I have never tried a setup like this, so try at your own risk. I don't think this would work with wubi though.

good luck.

[mbeichorn]

Alright, I give up for now. I am going to do a normal install (non-wubi) and use the virtualbox rawdisk abilities. It would be nice to know how to get virtualbox to recognize the .disk file or to mount it in windows and use rawdisk from there. I am going to have to wipe and reinstall in Nov when I get a school copy of Win7 so I will use a seperate partion for now, but in general when dual-booting I prefer wubi. I hope someone comes up with an answer, after all Vbox has an OSE and wubi is open source so there should be a way to hack around the difference. (I am a lowly rocket-science student not a programmer).

[xcollin]

i have come across a similar idea with damn small linux and some of the concepts may be helpful.
according to http://damnsmalllinux.org/usb.html you can boot dsl directly from a usb, or inside windows using qemu. i assume that this uses a qcow2 image since qemu uses qcow2 for virtual machine disk images. according to wikipedia's article on qcow,

"qcow images could be mounted under linux with mount option "offset" used. E.g. to mount a first (or single) partition from qcow image You need the command mount /path/to/image.img /mount/path -o loop,offset=32256."

you should be able to install ubuntu in a qcow2 image using qemu and run it as a vm as well as boot directly from it. this seems to me like the closest thing to using wubi.

[horse_dung]

I really don't see any technical issue with a VirtualBox VM booting a Wubi installed Ubuntu. It would require an additional disk image that locates the ubuntu/disks directory and then loop mounts it/them and continues booting.

The interesting part will be getting Shared Folders working so that the VM can see the host's folders... I'm going to play around with this now and will post back my results...

[horse_dung]

Okay, I've got it working. Getting VirtualBox drivers into initrd and then tweaking the scripts to load was a bit of challenge. I'll tidy it all up and then provide some instructions.

[P4man]

sounds interesting.. would this work with a non wubi install as well?

[horse_dung]

I'm pretty sure there are instructions out there on how to access raw disks in VirtualBox. You can use the raw disk to boot up pretty much any other "real" operating system you've got installed.

What I've done here is create a super small virtual machine that consists of a mostly standard Ubuntu boot up, but which then uses Shared Folders to find and then mount the WUBI image.

In most other scenarios I'm not sure you'd need to go to these lengths (e.g. boot an .iso image) as support is already there in VirtualBox. What Windows VirtualBox doesn't support (which frankly is silly) is the ability to say "this file I'm providing you with is a completely raw hard disk image... please boot it and treat it like the real thing...".

I've got a 64-bit version working rather nicely, if anyone wants it let me know (horse_dung[at]hotmail.com) otherwise I'll wait for 10.4 to come out, make sure the approach still works and then post instructions/appliances files somewhere.

[horse_dung]

Okay, I've got WUBI Ubuntu 10.04 LTS running from Windows 7 under VirtualBox 3.1.6 on 64-bit hardware. I could do with some BETA TESTERS that are willing to try this out.

If you want to try this as an end user then:

1. Go here http://dropbox.io/vboxwubi and download the .ovf and .vdmk files.

2. From virtual box click on File - Import Appliance and point to the .ovf file you downloaded

3. Edit the virtual machine settings, under the display section, change video ram to 32M

4. Edit the virtual machine settings, under shared folders, add new shared folder called "/vbox-wubi" that points to the root of the hard disk which has WUBI installed. For most people this will be "C:\". Note that both the name and the directory examples given here shouldn't have the quotes entered, but the slashes should be entered as seen.

5. Fire up the Virtual Machine and wait for your WUBI Ubuntu 10.04 to appear.



If you want to try this as a developer/hacker:

1. Go here http://dropbox.io/vboxwubi and download make.image

2. Beware: the script calls various tools like GRUB and Parted and, while it would be very unlikely, there is still potential for this script to destroy your Ubuntu install, your Windows install, any other operating systems you have installed and you credit rating.

3. Run ./make.image as the root user to build a VirtualBox virtual machine.

If the script doesn't work then run it again with "-v -v" to get more output and post back. Enjoy...! This should work fine for 32-bit. This definitely won't work with 9.10 or earlier as I had to make some changes to get it to work with 10.04. This will probably break whenever the host gets a new kernel and you will need to re-run the setup script.

[horse_dung]

Sorry, that URL should have read: http://drop.io/vboxwubi