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 :)

  • Axum
    3•4 months ago

    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

    • Daemon Silverstein
      1•4 months ago

      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)…