Installing Windows and Linux into the same partition
In terms of similar “interesting” things one I successfully did in the past that I wanted to share was to have a single Linux environment that you could either boot into or run in a VM.<p>VirtualBox supports fake disk images that are just pointers to a real block device, which could be an entire drive or partition.<p>I took advantage of that to have a dual-boot Linux &amp; Windows 7 install (with the main bootloader still being Windows’ as I hate GRUB) and then created a VM pointing to the Linux partition.<p>The system was configured to be able to deal with both the real hardware and the VM emulated HW. As far as I know most stuff worked out of the box, the only change I had to make was have two network configuration entries - one for physical hardware and one for the VM.<p>This worked really well actually and performance was good.