# Anyway to get on my gentoo partion from with XP?

## lk42pro

i know this might be too much to ask, but is there a way to access my gentoo partition within windows XP?...i want to have the best out of both worlds...

so i can let it emerge in the background while i am playing SoF2 demo or the upcoming Morrowind...

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## NicZak

As far as I know the answer is sort of...  I don't know of anything that will let you directly interact with your gentoo partition (by directly interact I mean opening up a shell or running *nix commands) but 'explore2fs' [http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm] will let you access all the files on your linux partition from winxp.  While this program does include write support it isn't reccomended.  There is another program similar to explore2fs called LTools which features a somewhat similar interface but a lot less user friendly setup.  I hope that somewhat helps in answering your question -

NicZak

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## fghellar

And if what you want is to run both systems at the same time, you should check vmware.

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## lk42pro

 *fghellar wrote:*   

> And if what you want is to run both systems at the same time, you should check vmware.

 

do i have to reinstall gentoo again indie a vmware virtual box?

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## clacour

Not necessarily, but when you boot, the kernel will see the fake hardware that VMWare provides. That may or may not work, depending on what you compiled your kernel for.

It's also possible to run VMWare under Linux, and run the XP session as the virtual one. Since running in a virtual environment slows you down somewhat, that might be a problem, depending on the type of game you're playing.

I got VMWare (ver 3.0), and I'm fairly happy with it so far. It's VERY nice for setting up experimental installs and such-like.

VMWare is fairly expensive ($300). You might want to check out Bochs or Plex86, which are both free.  Bochs is a hardware emulator -- it will run pretty much anything, but it's seriously slow.

Plex86 tries to get out of the way as much as possible, and is reputed to run a lot faster. I've downloaded it, but haven't tried it out yet, because they hide the documentation. (More specifically, they make it available only in a complicated format that requires two or three other packages to be able to read. I'm still discovering which packages and getting them installed.)

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