[sf-lug] dual-boot

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Akkana Peck (akkana at shallowsky.com):

> Nice! Thanks for that tip. I will try it when I next find myself
> with a new Windows laptop, which might be fairly soon. (For now,
> I'm doing okay with my Asus 1015E, a little 2.5-lb 10" screen
> laptop that came with Ubuntu.

Ooh, lovely little machine, that.  Definitely a good pick for those
cramped airplane seats.

> Certainly true. OSes on disk can be backed up to other media, either
> inside or outside a VM; but I've never had to restore a Windows OEM
> backup and was never 100% confident a restore would work.

The nice thing about the VM approach is that you can test success
without burning your bridges.  That is, image the preload to a file
using VMware's p2c utility, onto an external drive.  Take that drive to
a machine with VirtualBox (or VMware) available.  Launch the VM, make
sure it works.

The VM file can then serve as your master copy of the preload OS, in
case you suffer mass storage failure or otherwise need a fresh copy.

So, it actually solves a couple of different problems.