In Traction

I managed to destroy my Windows XP partition a few weeks ago while trying to resize it. Fortunately I made a backup. I decided to try to run Windows inside a virtual machine. After removing the broken NTFS partition, I reused the free space to create a new /home partition.

I created a disk image with QEMU, and ran a Windows XP installation on it through VMware Player. And I must say, it works perfectly. I am even able to connect to USB devices such as a PocketPC.

In the picture below I am debugging a Compact .NET Hello World application in Visual Studio in Windows in VMware. The application is running on the PDA that is attached to the PC.

Here is a screenshot of Visual Studio running the PocketPC emulator:

Speed is not an issue: the image runs almost at native speed thanks to the kernel modules. Whenever I need Windows (I rarely do), I just fire up VMware Player, and I am able to dig right in because it saved the previous state. And when I’m finished I just suspend the virtual machine.

I don’t think I’ll go back to a dual-boot system soon.