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 :)

  • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    30 days ago

    What you’re asking is if you can run the existing Linux Mint on your drive within Windows running on the same drive?

    It may be feasible if VirtualBox or VMWare are able to access/mount the existing Linux partition as if its a virtual drive, and boot the OS but its likely to be difficult. The main issue is that windows does not easily mount Linux partitions. It is also an edge case use for most users so there will likely not be much guidance on how to achieve this easily.

    It might work more easily the opposite way round - boot Linux and mount Windows within Virtualbox but is not likely to be straightforward. Windows may be less flexible about being booted into a virtual machine with totally different hardware.

    All this may be overkill to the problems you’re trying to solve. You can mount the existing NTFS Windows drive within Linux Mint to access all your windows files without any virtualization. But I’m not clear what “settings” you’re looking at when you boot back in to windows? That seems to be the stumbling block. Is is specific software / tools you’re trying to migrate settings for?

    Another approach may be to launch windows, create a new linux Mint VM in Virtualbox, share a folder between Linux VM and Windows host, create whatever settings you’re trying to migrate in your VM Linux Mint, and when happy copy the home folder / settings folders into the shared folder. Then boot your PC into linux, mount the windows drive and pick up the settings files from the shared folder to migrate into your main Mint system. But whether that is even worth doing depends on what you’re trying to migrate.