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 :)

  • Zohran69@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    3 months ago

    Yup. Sure can. It’ll run as good as the system Resources’s you allocate during the install. I run them quite often with virtualbox

    • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      That’s good to know :)

      Is there anything special that I need to do, or do I just boot from the Mint boot drive?

      • M500@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        Depending on which virtual machine software you use, you might need to go onto the Linux even after you boot from it and run some programmer script to install drivers or something, but depends on which virtual machine software you use.

    • Archer@lemmy.world
      1·
      3 months ago

      VMWare Workstation is now free as well if you can tolerate Broadcom’s dogshit website