how to use virtualbox on windows 10 to run linux

Now, you are ready to boot your Windows installation from within Linux :-) Single-drive machines ¶Īn additional remark regarding the disk block devices. Jamie Scaife added illustrating screenshots for the creation and configuration step. However, when you reach the 'Hard disk' section, select to use an existing virtual hard disk file and select the /path/to/diskname.vdmk.įinally, if Windows 10 is an EFI install, make sure to Enable EFI in the System-section of the configuration of your virtual machine. Set up a new Virtual Machine as you normally would. To virtualize your Windows installation, you just need to create a Virtual Machine inside VirtualBox. RAW host disk access VMDK file /path/to/diskname.vmdk created successfully. To spot the device when your Windows-disk is mounted, you can use The reason is that during installation Windows (at least Windows 10) creates a bunch of partitions itself, like an EFI partition, a boot partition, and so on. So you need to find out /dev/sdb, for example, instead of something like /dev/sdb3. It is important to identify the disk, not the partition. Identify the disk ¶įirst of all, you need to identify the disk on which Windows lives inside your computer. These are the steps I took to get it to work.

Luckily, I found a way to virtualize the Windows installation in Virtualbox. But having a Windows installation AND a virtual Windows eats up disk space real quick. So I decided not to dump that standard installation but, instead, install Ubuntu Linux next to it. When I got my laptop from work, it came with Windows pre-installed together with an Office suite and so on.

For my home machines, I use Linux as my main operating system and have Windows inside a Virtualbox.

Even as a passionate Linux user I prefer Windows for certain tasks (e.g.

How to use virtualbox on windows 10 to run linux