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 :)
I know that you can use a Type-1 Hypervisor to run two OSes at once. That will generally need a higher spec system, because it basically runs two systems at once. Not a very practical option.
From what I can tell, they would both need their own boot partition, which is where I’m stuck. My Windows and Mint installations share a boot partition, and it causes problems for this.
I know that it’s not very practical, for most people, but imagine having to use Windows for work or a specific game, and still being able to access your distro as normal. It could be handy for a small niche, and felt like an interesting challenge :)
a type 1 hypervisor is practically an operating system itself, just a very minimal one. it’s like installing virtualbox to your hard drive. it’s probably not best for your situation, because its usually used in servers.