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 :)

  • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
    1·
    27 days 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.