Tiny Core Linux > VirtualBox

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VirtualBox
　　If you are a Windows user, have you ever wondered how difficult it is to work with or experiment with tinycore?

This is bacause many people would find it inconvenient to boot intotinycore every time they need to make a small change, cook up apackage, or simply experiment.

I have a great suggestion that would ease your pains. You can actuallyboot tinycore within a virtual machine like Sun VirtualBox. This willallow you to boot TinyCore as a "window" within your existing OS, andeven works on Windows!

There are 3 ways of doing this, of which the last one I like best.
The last one is a Hybrid Boot setup, allowing booting TinyCore from adisk partition after the BIOS, and also within Windows itself as aVirtualBox VM instance reading from the same disk partition.

Note: This tutorial emphasizes on Safety. There is very very littlechance of corrupting your hard-drive or existing Operating System. Forexample, VBoxManage commands restricts write to only the new partition.

Windows Host Os
Method 1: VBox Boot from Mounted Tinycore ISO
　　The tutorial here will be focused on getting you up and running the simplest way.

Method 2: VBox Boot from Tinycore Virtual Disk
　　The tutorial here will be slightly more complicated as you would needto initialize a .vdi virtual-disk file, then perform installation ofTinycore on the virtual disk.

Method 3: VBox Boot from Tinycore Virtual Physical Parition
　　The tutorial here will be slightly more tedious, but not morecomplicated, exploiting a lesser known feature that allows VBox to bootfrom a physical partition residing on your disk.

This produces a Hybrid Boot setup where you can boot Tinycore withinWindows and also normally from BIOS (to gain the best performance).Paragon Ext2Browser (read & write) is used to allow you to copyfiles in and out of Tinycore (from within Windows).


STEPS
　　
Part A

• EUSEAS Partition Manager Home (freeware) is used to shrink theexisting NTFS partition by a meager 2GB. Other partition managers likegparted can be used. Then, a new unformatted partition is created inthe free space.
  
• The VBox Partition Pointer file (.vmdk) is created withVBoxManageinternalcommands createrawvmdk -filename PhysicalDrive0-Partition2.vmdk-rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive0 -partitions 2 -mbr C:\grub.mbr -register
  (grub.mbr here is an empty "notepad" file we created.) (Win Vista:console/cmd with Administrator access is required for this step)  Read more on VBoxManage
  

　　
Part B
Note: This part requires understanding of the  Official TC Install Guide.All steps are exactly the same as the official install guide, exceptyou are doing it from Windows through the VM. The partition does notneed the bootable flag, thus you can skip the whole part regardingcfdisk. For beginners, it would be good to follow along the nicescreenshots in the official guide.

• We then boot Tinycore in VirtualBox from the Mounted Tinycore ISO. (Win Vista: Start VirtualBox as Administrator)
  
• And dofdisk /dev/sda
  to delete & recreate partition 2, thenmkfs.ext3 /dev/sda2
  
• Grub extension is first installed from the Appbrowser. Bootfiles are then copied from /mnt/hdc/boot to /mnt/sda2/boot. Grubspecial files also. The /mnt/sda2/boot/grub/menu.lst is created. Youcan also add the xvesa option to the kernel option of grub to set thedesktop resolutionkernel    /boot/bzImage quiet xvesa=800x600x24
  so when it runs in a window it fits on the screen. The vga option only affects the terminal.
  
• Grub is initialized with root (hd0,1) and setup (hd0,2) and setup (hd0).
  
• Lastly, the grub MBR is extracted withdd if=/dev/sda2 of=/home/tc/grub.mbr bs=512 count=1
  .
  

　　
Part C

• Paragon Ext2Browser is installed giving us access to the ext3partition we created from within Windows. We copy out the/home/tc/grub.mbr to C:/grub.mbr
  
• Finally, we edit boot.ini (WinXp) or use bcdedit (Vista) or  EasyBCDto create a record in Windows Bootloader to allow us to boot into grub when in the "Choose your operating System" Screen. Read  this linkto find out how.
  
• Shiretoko, Xfe, Xfw extensions are installed to give the common user some ease.
  

　　

Help needed

• It would be nice if someone can create an automated(tce.installed) batch script for Part B, package it up a an extension(which has a dep on grub extension), and submit it to the onlinerepository. This would make Tinycore more accessible to the masses outthere.
  
• The tutorial above need more detailed elaboration, which I hope anyone who tries the tutorial can help complete.
  
• People with ingenious ideas of how  Portable VirtualBoxcan be used to deliver a USB flash disk that boots TC. The TC can befrom a hidden ext3 partition on the USB flash disk, not necessarilyfrom a file.
  
• Method 3 can also be adapted to the case that you alreadyhave an existing Tinycore installed in a partition, but now would liketo boot it in VirtualBox on Windows.