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 :)

  • TipponOPEnglish
    1•4 months ago

    You might be misunderstanding what I want to do. I want to boot my existing Mint partition as a VM under Windows, not make a new VM with its own drive.

    From what I can tell, it might be possible if the distro is on its own drive with its own boot partition, but my Mint installation is on a partition on the same drive as Windows, and they share the same boot partition.

    • @kitnaht
      3•4 months ago

      Didn’t misunderstand at all, you just used different wording.

      You want to utilize an existing partition on the drive, as a VM image and boot it while you’re in Windows.

      The answer is yes, you can. Again, the VM part isn’t the problem here. Virtualbox can do it, but they require some major workarounds in order to do.

      https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/784138-howto-boot-existing-ubuntu-partition-using-virtualbox-inside-windows/

      This is just one example out of many out there on Google. Understand that the commands here are NOT making a new drive image. They are making a drive image FILE that is specially formatted with the tools to point to the existing partition on the drive. VMWare can do this, QEMU can do this, Virtualbox can do this… you’re just making a VM image, where the data points to an actual hard existing partition on the drive.

      Once again – This is NOT making a new VM with its own drive, even though the command looks similar. I’m sure HyperV can do it as well, I’m simply not familiar enough with its packaging.

      • TipponOPEnglish
        1•4 months ago

        Apologies, yes, I did misunderstand you.

        I got VMware to recognise the partition, but it couldn’t boot it. Everything I found said that the distro needed to be on a separate drive with its own boot partition. I found threads saying that VirtualBox couldn’t do it either, but I’d be happy to be wrong :)

        I’m not at my computer now, so won’t get a chance to try it for at least a few hours.

        Thanks for the link and the information :)