Portable VirtualBox for Windows

Virtual machines, emulation, etc.
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cimarron
Posts: 292
Joined: Fri 31 May 2013, 01:57

Portable VirtualBox for Windows

#1 Post by cimarron »

I've just come across a nice addition for my bootable USB drives (with Puppy, and sometimes other linux OSs): Portable VirtualBox for Windows. It installs Virtualbox on your flash drive and allows running Puppy or other OSs in Windows, without rebooting. I use it mainly for running LiveCDs, but anyone with more knowledge of VirtualBox could do more. Works well on XP and Win7 (I'm not able to test any other hosts).

Portable VirtualBox can be downloaded here: http://www.vbox.me/

It basically just downloads VirtualBox and installs it in a folder so it can be run portably. The most recent VB version it's set up for is 4.3.18, but you can download whatever version you want and just point the Portable VirtualBox installer at your download. (I ended up using 4.3.12, since it ran better on one of the Win7 computers I have.)

Put one or more Puppy (or other) ISOs on the USB drive with the Portable VirtualBox folder and you can boot them easily inside a Windows host. It requires an Admin account to run, due to the nature of VirtualBox, but VB is not installed on the host. For some advanced options, drivers may be installed, but they are removed when you quit.

VirtualBox also has a "snapshot" function, that saves the state of the OS so you can go back to it, similar to a Windows restore point. I found if I take a snapshot once Puppy is booted (in VirtualBox), I could later restore the snapshot and have a freshly booted Puppy in less than 30 seconds. (If video resolution needs to be adjusted, as seems common with Puppy and VirtualBox, this can be done before the snapshot and it will be correct each time you restore.) The snapshot was about 385M for my Precise pup, saved on the flash drive, and I was able to successfully restore the snapshot on another Windows computer with everything working. A USB drive virtual machine boot in less than 30 secondsI

s243a
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#2 Post by s243a »

One thing that I notice for virtual box is that there are different versions for different hosts. Would installing this version help with this. Perhaps several different hosts could be installed on the same stick.

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cimarron
Posts: 292
Joined: Fri 31 May 2013, 01:57

#3 Post by cimarron »

In theory, I suppose. But I haven't seen portable versions of VirtualBox for linux or OSX (then again, I haven't been looking...). QEMU can be put on a USB drive, but I found it terribly slow.

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