Is it possible to boot Windows from a virtual hard disk image? -

Just wondering if this is possible. I want to dual-boot with Windows 7, but my partition layout is already pretty crazy and I d have to change a lot of things to make a room for a Windows partition. So I m looking for a way (besides virtual machines) to dual-boot without having to repartition my hard drive. I m using lilo as a bootloader

There are methods for booting hard disk and floppy images, but you d have to have crazy amounts of RAM (the size of the image plus the amount Windows 7 requires) to load it. You also wouldn t be able to save your changes. http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php...

To dual-boot Windows you will need a boot manager . I think windows xp has a boot manager you will have to edit the boot.ini boot =0 or a 1 or 2 I forget which. What other OS are you trying to boot? I have dual booted Windows 95 and NT, dos and OS/2 from partitions. I have never booted from a virtual image before.

Short of adding another hard drive and configuring lilo to boot off of sda1 instead of 0 for that OS, VM would be about the only way to go.