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 :)

  • *dust.sysEnglish
    3•3 months ago

    Hyper-V will work with physical disk, but be warned - the wizard you run through when making a VM will make it look like you give the VM a VHD file for storage or nothing. Just attach no storage to the VM initially, then go into the VM settings after the wizard is complete to attach something besides a VHD.

    Can’t entirely remember if it handles partitions but I know it can boot particular disks and if the setting exists, that’s where it would be

      • osaerisxero
        2•3 months ago

        This is one area where Win11 (and maybe an updated win10?) might have a leg up: my hyper V has the option of adding a disk later in the wizard, which allows me to go into IDE controller 0 and mount a physical disk in the new vm’s settings:

        https://files.catbox.moe/ss8pwv.png

        https://files.catbox.moe/nr9rdl.png

        • TipponOPEnglish
          2•3 months ago

          I might have hit my limit :(

          VMware is letting me do something similar, and I’ve attached the Mint partition, but because the boot partition is separate and in use, it’s not letting me go any further. There’s probably a way around it, but it’s beyond what I know how to do, and I don’t want to risk breaking my Mint installation.

          • osaerisxero
            3•3 months ago

            I’m not sure. I never ran into an issue with the boot partition last time I did this, but that was vmware fusion on a macos host in like… 2015 so. So while I would probably just yolo it and unmount the boot partition (or maybe try to migrate/reinstall to another drive so it can have its own boot partition?), you might be better off trying something else.

            Either that or try another hypervisor

            • TipponOPEnglish
              1•3 months ago

              To be honest, I’ve given up. I was hoping that it would be something to make my life easier for a short while, but the amount of work to get it running is going to be more than just dual booting and swapping OSes for a while.

              It’s a shame, as it could be an interesting project, but it’s quite a niche need going by some of the replies here, and isn’t worth the effort.

          • *dust.sysEnglish
            1•3 months ago

            Honestly, this is the point where I’d just make a new VM and manually migrate what I need to