how to use virtualbox with existing windows

#How to use virtualbox with existing windows for windows 10#
#How to use virtualbox with existing windows windows 10#

I know that my Windows partition is formatted as NTFS and is about 300 GB in size, so I was able to determine that device /dev/sda2 is my Windows installation. As I mentioned above I’m using Linux Mint 19.3, so this can be accomplished with the lsblk command or the “Disks” GUI application included with Mint:Īs you can see, I have multiple disks each with multiple partitions. The first step is to identify the disk which contains my Windows installation. The concept is pretty straight forward – A Virtual Machine Disk file (VMDK) points to the physical partition, and that file is used to create a virtual machine. I can also boot directly into Windows if I choose. NET development and other Windows-specific tasks.

#How to use virtualbox with existing windows windows 10#

Such a solution is ideal for me – I can boot into Linux Mint for my regular daily use and run the Windows 10 VM from there to do. So I pondered the question “can I create a virtual machine from the existing Windows 10 installation on my hard drive?” After some quick Googling, I was surprised to learn that the answer is “yes!” I found this post from Jamie Scaife’s blog and this question on to be particularly helpful. I also didn’t necessarily want to make the switch to use Windows in a VM 100% of the time, I still wanted to be able to boot into Windows. I didn’t want to maintain two separate Windows environments for daily use.

This approach would be an acceptable solution, but I would then have two separate Windows machines, one virtual and one physical. However, this would require going through the Windows installation process from scratch, configuring everything to my liking, installing all the software and development tools I require, etc.

#How to use virtualbox with existing windows for windows 10#

Switching between each operating system required a reboot of my machine, and I contemplated creating a new virtual machine instance for Windows 10 (using Oracle’s VirtualBox) so I could target Linux and Windows at the same time. I do still use Windows regularly it is my preferred operating system for playing games and for. Recently, I have been using Linux Mint 19.3 as my primary operating system, booting into it more often than Windows 10. I am a long time Linux user ( Mint being my preferred distro) and have dual booted Windows and Linux on every computer I have owned in the last decade.