Emulation

Windows: VirtualTi

For example if you want to run Windows from Linux without having to reboot.

Seems to be possible thanks to Windows hardware profiles: http://oopsilon.com/Running-a-Windows-Partition-in-VMware

modprobe nbd # Kernel: Device Drivers | Block Devices | Network block device support <M>
vmware-loop disk.vmdk 1 /dev/nbd0&
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/nbd0 /mnt/disk

Be careful it was sort of freezing my computer when trying to copy huge amount of data between two such mounted vmdk drives…

If you cannot / don't want run your dual boot Windows installation in the VM, you can still try to keep your virtual installation small (< 5GB) even with lots of large programs, by creating ntfs junctions for all large programs (Visual Studio, C++Builder, MS Office, Matlab, Mathematica, MiKTeX, …), from the virtual disk to the Windows installation on the dual boot partition.

You need full read/write access to you Windows ntfs partition. You can probably use the shared folders of your emulator, or a SAMBA share, combined with the read/write ntfs-3g driver for Linux, but I prefer to mount my real hard drive as a virtual disk. In order to do that, create a disk.vmdk of type fullDevice:

# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
CID=d11aaceb
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="fullDevice"
 
# Extent description
RW 234436545 FLAT "/dev/hda" 0 # !change
 
# The Disk Data Base
#DDB
 
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "4"
ddb.adapterType = "ide"
ddb.toolsVersion = "0"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "232581" # !change
ddb.geometry.heads = "16" # !change
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63" # !change
ddb.geometry.biosCylinders = "232581" # !change
ddb.geometry.biosHeads = "16" # !change
ddb.geometry.biosSectors = "63" # !change
ddb.uuid.image ="6cbd1dfc-2e6e-495a-0b87-58e4711395c8"
ddb.uuid.modification ="1c531233-6a69-4a6e-35a7-fd2c492b8ac8"
ddb.uuid.parent ="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"

You can use parted in order to find out which values to put for your hard drive.

Well known, but didn't work for me …

The one I use, very nice.

See VirtualBox.