Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. Installed Ubuntu 20.04 or upgraded Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa, Windows 10, or most any Linux distribution Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used However, booting the virtual machine loads Grub at some point and let's me choose which operating system to boot.Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa running on a virtual machine in VirtualBox Software Requirements and Linux Command Line Conventions Category And I chose to add my user to the disk group as I don't know if changing the group of the disk of the operating system has any consequences. I created the VMDK-file representing the hard drive on which the host system lives. That means that I have both the Linux and the Windows installations on the same block device but on different partitions. In my case, the laptop shipped with a single hard drive. 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.

Running ubuntu on windows 10 virtualbox