Dual booting and Virtual Box

I had this idea last night and I was wondering if anyone has heard of it before.

My idea is to setup a computer with a dual boot. One for linux and another for windows. However, I think it would be cool if you could setup a virtual machine that ran off the second partition (windows partition).

For example: I could be booted into linux and access my windows boot via a virtual machine. Or I could restart my computer and boot into windows.

If it went both ways it would be amazing!

Anyone heard of anything like this? If not, do you think it would work/could be done?

Virtual machines don't work exactly like a physical partition; the data on a virtual drive is usually stored in a single file; it doesn't use the filesystem directly. You can't "hook up" a virtual machine to an existing partition.

I did a little digging and I found some articles on it, but I'm not 100% if they are running a virutal machine off of a partition or if they are converting a parition to a virtual machine file.

http://imrannazar.com/Running-a-Windows ... -in-VMware

If they did manage to hack it so that VMWare could run a native Windows partition, I'd be impressed.

Actually the trick is not exactly to run a native window in VMWare, but more to natively run a VMWared Windows.
But anyway that's quite impressive yea