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Thread: Virtual Drives?

  1. June 7th, 2003, 10:45 PM #1
    jaguar291
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    Virtual Drives?

    I know it's not security but it's a newbie question so this seems to be the right place to put this.

    I was making a virtual drive for a game (so that I could play w/o the CD) and a questoin hit me. Could I make a virtual drive on my C:\ and then use it to run Linux?
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  2. June 7th, 2003, 11:18 PM #2
    Vigge
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    No, you will need a partition to put a normal Linux Dist on, a virtual drive is just as it name suggests, virtual.
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  3. June 7th, 2003, 11:20 PM #3
    jaguar291
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    I don't know much about partitioning drives but I always *thought* that when a virtual drive is created it is a partition...?


    EDIT: Skipped a word!
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  4. June 7th, 2003, 11:32 PM #4
    Vigge
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    A Virtual Drive allows you to use a single drive letter (d:\ e:\ etc) to specify a path, for example C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Desktop\

    In other words a Virtual Drive "is just a link".

    A Partition on the other hand is used to devide your memory space on the HDD into parts that is "seperated" from each other. A good use for this is for example to have Win* on one partition and *nix on another.
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  5. June 8th, 2003, 12:07 AM #5
    Maestr0
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    A virtual drive is just as Viggie suggests a symbolic link mapped to an area of an existing partition and assigned a letter. The information about this virtual file system is contained in RAM or in a temporary section of the drive. A LOGICAL drive is a partition of a physical drive which is assigned a letter of its own even though it physically resides on another drive(i.e. When you create a D: drive in addition to C: drive even though there is physically only 1 HDD), all file system information is written to this drive when the drive is partitioned and is permanent until re-partitioned. All information concerning a virtual drive is volitile and is destroyed once the machince is rebooted, which is why you will not be able to boot from it(hence run linux) As a side note it is not unusual for some one to create a small partition(a logical drive maybe 1 gig or so) on their hardrive to use as sort of a Virtual CD-Rom drive which can be used to either mount CD images or possibly boot a very small distro of linux. This drive could also be used to store images or 'ghosts' of the rest of the system for back-up purposes as well.

    -Maestr0
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  6. June 8th, 2003, 05:02 AM #6
    jaguar291
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    Ahh... there goes what I thought would be a kick ass idea... thanks for clearing that up for me Maestr0 and Vigge
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