Booting a physical Windows 10 disk on Linux using VirtualBox | Hacker News Reader

Booting a physical Windows 10 disk on Linux using VirtualBox

jamieweb.net

25 pointsjamieweb15 comments

This seems complicated. You can download a copy of of Windows 10 in ISO format via this link:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10I...

(You need to be using a non-Windows PC otherwise that link will redirect to the Windows Media Creation Tool[1])

Then just install it into a new VM in VirtualBox. It won't activate, and it will nag you about this, but it will still stay fully usable, you just wont be able to change small things like the colour scheme. Which is perfectly fine if it's a crash-and-burn VM for testing.

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[1] Or just change your browser user-agent to report linux.

Even better, MS offers free VMs for testing their browsers:

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...

When a vm is running off a physical partition or lvm lv, it is much faster than vm running off a file. All the overhead of the host filesystem goes away.

If you do this with a SSD, make sure the guest OS can do the trimming.

The same could be achieved using QEMU/KVM by adding the physical disk path (/dev/disk/by-id/<drive ID here>) as a storage device using whatever method you fancy.

I have used this technique quite a bit and it is very handy in dual/multi boot systems where I need to run the second OS while using my main OS. Or install one to an external drive and use it elsewhere later on.

A similar technic also exists to use Windows in VirtualBox on MacOS. http://danielphil.github.io/windows/virtualbox/osx/2015/08/2...

I did this many years ago with a dual boot computer and Windows (7 iirc) kept complaining about needing to be reactivated when I’d switch between running natively and virtualized. Has that been fixed on Windows 10?

If you substantially change the hardware of your computer, you are supposed to get a new licence because it's like it is another computer. It's not a bug but a feature.

In my case, the first time I fully booted the Windows 10 disk was in the VM. I wonder if this counted as a 'change' or does it think that the VM is the original hardware now?

I bet that if you tried to boot the disk naitively then Windows would want to be activated.

Maybe! Windows seems to be activated just fine in the VM.

It’s a feature for Microsoft, but a bug as far as the users are concerned.

If you want to use Windows without paying for a licence you can just install kmspico.

What most people want is to pay and then not worry about random downgrades and deactivations, even if they upgrade a parr or two, or boot the same machine indirectly through a hyper visor.

Apparently, Microsoft does not or cannot deliver this, and as we’ve seen this week may randomly downgrade your system even if nothing changed.

I once did something similar on a Linux & Windows dual-boot where the Linux partition was bootable both as bare-metal and under Windows in VirtualBox.

That's what this is just the other way around on the VM portion.

I have my current computer set up in a 4 way: Windows native, Linux Native, Windows disk in KVM VM, Linux disk in Hyper-V VM. Hyper-V was probably the easiest, just click the radio and select the disk.

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