This might sound daft, but something similar used to work with live discs.
I’ve got Windows 10 and Mint 21.1 dual booting on my computer at the moment. Every so often I’ll realise that I’ve missed something from my Windows installation. If it’s important, I then have to boot to Windows to get the information, or the settings etc.
Is there a way to virtualise my Mint installation so that I can run both the OSs at once to make sure that I’ve got everything?
VirtualBox had a tool to do this with a live USB, but that was back in the MBR days, so it probably won’t work with modern hardware.
EDIT: Sorry, I should clarify, Mint and Windows are on the same physical disk, and the plan is to remove Windows once I’m done.
Update: I’m giving up. It looks like it is possible if you have separate disks with separate boot partitions, but getting it to work with a shared boot partition is harder work than I’m willing to do right now.
VMware Player can use a partition or disk, but might be in read only mode, I couldn’t get far enough to check.
Thanks for all the replies :)
Yes, you can run Linux in a VM.
But also: you should be able to access your Windows partition from Linux, as it supports NTFS and FAT filesystems, and view the files there.
What I do is I have one partition with Windows, one with Linux, and a third one (with an NTFS file system) for the files I need to access from both.
Sorry, I should have clarified, I’ve got a data disc, but I’m forgetting about things that need to be migrated, like Thunderbird profiles and Syncthing. As far as I can tell, I need to export them first, and then import them in Mint. If I set Mint as a VM, I should be able to do it all in one go and hopefully not forget anything else :)
I think all the existing answers are on the basis of creating a new Linux VM.
And if I understand you correctly, you already have a bare metal Linux install that you want to run whilst Windows is up.
This is the best search result I could find: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=93437
It sounds like Virtualbox will indeed create a pseudo vhdx that points to a real partition, but windows is going to give you permissions drama.
The above link is out of date though, so its best viewed as info rather than guide.
Good luck.
Thanks for the link :)
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they got it working from a partition, but I’ve found this link for VMWare that might work:
I know that you can use a Type-1 Hypervisor to run two OSes at once. That will generally need a higher spec system, because it basically runs two systems at once. Not a very practical option.
From what I can tell, they would both need their own boot partition, which is where I’m stuck. My Windows and Mint installations share a boot partition, and it causes problems for this.
I know that it’s not very practical, for most people, but imagine having to use Windows for work or a specific game, and still being able to access your distro as normal. It could be handy for a small niche, and felt like an interesting challenge :)
a type 1 hypervisor is practically an operating system itself, just a very minimal one. it’s like installing virtualbox to your hard drive. it’s probably not best for your situation, because its usually used in servers.
I succeeded in doing this once long ago. Then while in the Linux vm I wiped the VM’s partition table, which wiped the physical disk partition table, including windows. Do not recommend.
I’ll definitely try to avoid that! :o
If you’re using the ‘Pro’ or ‘Education’ license for Windows 10, you can look into Hyper-V, which should allow you to boot a VM from a physical disk.
Hyper-V is built-in to Windows; & you just need to enable it in system settings.
Not sure if it works with partitions, if you’re dual booting the OSs from separate partitions on the same disk – it probably doesn’t; in which case you might need to migrate Mint to its dedicated disk first.
Yeah, it’s partitions that I’m dealing with. My goal is to transfer everything over, give it a few weeks to make sure that I haven’t missed anything, then wipe Windows from the partition so that Mint has the full disc.
AFAIK on Windows the physical disk containing the partition needs to be marked offline in Disk Management, and the disk or a partition given exclusively to VirtualBox running as administrator, otherwise access is limited to read-only
I would suggest checking some other sources as well, just in case this has changed over the years. If you do successfully pass the physical partition into VirtualBox read-write, you might need to set up a virtual disk with grub to boot into your physical Linux partition
Yeah, that’s what another user found too. It doesn’t look like VirtualBox can do it, but this thread suggests that VMWare might be able to. I’m just trying it now :)
This is definitely an XY problem and your solution is kinda insane.
Just install ntfs drivers on Linux, and ext4 drivers on windows.
Or if you truly need both constantly at the same time, ditch the physical install and commit to WSL
If Linux is configured to use LUKS and/or Windows is configured to use Bitlocker, it’s not so simple as just installing the ext4/NTFS driver.
Also, neither Linux can run Windows programs (I’m aware of Wine, but AFAIK Wine won’t run software already installed on an existing Windows installation) nor Windows can run Linux programs (I’m also aware of WSL, but apart from very specific chroot-ings, AFAIK one can’t run software from pre-existing Linux installations)…