This morning I finished setting up my multi-boot system (XP/Kubuntu/Win7) and had an interesting idea... What if I mount my boot partitions as virtual machines so I can access them while loaded in another operating system?
The obvious purpose of multi-boot is to be able to load the OS naively when needed, otherwise I'd have just used a bare-metal hypervisor like VMware ESXi or Xen, but what about the little tasks that you don't want to have to reboot for? I know that you can mount a partition as a client OS and that as long as you don't try to load the OS that you're using at the time there wont be any issues because of it, but the concern I have is with windows hardware detection.
Will it accept this system as activated, or will it see it as a change in hardware every time I switch between a visualized and native environment?
Any input is greatly appreciated and I'll let everybody know how it plays out.