Can I boot the guest OS if the host OS crashes?

[vtoh]

I actually have 2 questions:

1. Can I boot the other guest OS if the host OS crashes? Would I be able to retrieve files that were originally inside my host OS via my guest OS?
   
2. Will the VM affect the performance? i.e. if i have 4GB of memory and assign 1GB of memory to each OS, would it mean that each individual OS will lag significantly?
   

[nnmansoori]

Hi, can you specify more details, what version of VMware you are using?

if it is VMware Workstation, which version and what is the host operating system?

if you ran it on windows, are there any other partitions other than the operating system that you put your guest files on it?

[continuum]

1. nope - only way to do that is creating a LiveCD with Workstation and then boot from there

2. it of course affects performance of the host OS if you run resource-hungry applications - and Workstation is a very resource hungry application
but usually this should be ok - unless you run too many VMs at the same time

[WoodyZ]

I actually have 2 questions:

You actually have three questions, two under number one and one under number two.

Can I boot the other guest OS if the host OS crashes?

As the crashed Host OS sits in this state and without copying the Virtual Machine to another working system or use the method mentioned by continuum, then the answer is emphatically no!   If a system has crashed how could you possibly expect to run an application on a crashed system?

Would I be able to retrieve files that were originally inside my host OS via my guest OS?

If the Host OS will not boot then boot the physical machine with a Live OS CD/DVD and recover your User Data including any Virtual Machines.

One distro that is very hand for this is Slax.

200MB

iso

download Slax for CD

v 6.1.2

[ mirror | md5 ]

Obviously you'll need to download this and burn it to optical media on a working system, maybe a friends system, if you don't already have a Live OS CD/DVD to use in the recovery.