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Ooh! I just successfully installed Virtualbox, and I'm hooked!

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mouser:
Question: if they'd been running a guest OS in a VM, I could just have terminated the guest OS and restarted it, and we'd have been okay, right?
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if it messed up the guest os then simply restarting the guest os wouldn't necesarily have saved it from being messed up, BUT you can very easily make SNAPSHOTS of the guest os so you could have reset it to the last good stable setup in 60 seconds.

kyrathaba:
What actually happened, according to the IT guy that repaired the PC, is that the MBR got corrupted.  So, if the (assumed virus-laden) program had been running in a guest OS, it wouldn't have been able to harm the actual host OS's MBR, right?

mouser:
So, if the (assumed virus-laden) program had been running in a guest OS, it wouldn't have been able to harm the actual host OS's MBR, right?
--- End quote ---

right*.



* there is a very very tiny theoretically chance that the virus could be programmed with an exploit specifically designed specifically to break through the virtual machine if they can find an exploit to do so, but the chances of this actually happening to you seem negligible.

ewemoa:
I tend to keep snapshots of my initial installation + updates so I can revert.

On a related note, for VMware player, AFAIU, there is no snapshot capability so I keep a backup of the whole directory where the guest OS is stored for restoration purposes.

Crashing Host OSVirtualBox had been quite good until it repeatedly started restarting my host machine (!!) -- this only started happening recently, and as I understand it, the culprit is one of the many Active X controls that financial sites (in a land Renegade is familiar with) force on the user.

That got me to try out VMware player, and that didn't suffer the same problem.

However, if you do some searches you'll probably find that both VirtualBox and VMware products have had problems with some Active X controls.  So my conclusion is to keep both handy - diversification may be our friend here.

I haven't heard of other major host-os-killing situations though, so perhaps you won't ever be effected :)

kyrathaba:
Thanks for the info, E.  I'm mainly interested in having a VM available to try out "iffy" programs for awhile, in order to decide if I dare install them on my host OS.

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