I've installed Ubuntu 20.04 on an external SSD and it works fine both on my Laptop and on my Desktop, but while I use it on my desktop I can not use Windows 10 (obviously).

So I though: could it be possible to start my Ubuntu on the SSD from a virtual machine inside W10?(saying: hey WmWare, Ubuntu is on the external SSD, go and launch it from there).

Thanks

(I'm new to Ubuntu. Be gentle, please)

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3 Answers

If I am reading what you are saying correctly, you seem to be implying you have two disks in the laptop, one with Windows installed and one with Ubuntu installed.

Yes, you most hypervisors can run the OS off a physical disk. The exact procedure will depend on the hypervisor you use. Note that you will have to install the bootloader on the second disk so that when you pass the entire raw second disk with Ubuntu to the hypervisor for the guest, it will be able to boot inside the VM.

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You can try installing VirtualBox within Windows 10 on your desktop. Download an Ubuntu iso and you can create a VM from this, it is well documented. It should have good performance on your SSD but the VM will require substantial RAM resources too.

Another way to run Ubuntu from within Windows 10 is to use their WSL (or WSL2?) Windows Subsystem for Linux. I am not a windows user and have not tried this myself, and am not sure if it allows GUI apps, but it's another option.

I see 2 options off the top of my head... Really just 1), the other is going to be rather hard but conceptually not that bad.... but it does work.

1.) Makes the most sense to me - dual boot
-Put the drive in the Desktop.
-Go into the bios and select the ubuntu drive as the first in boot priority(or the only option).
-Boot into Ubuntu sudo update-grub to let ubuntu detect the Windows OS and add it to the grub menu, as a boot option from now on.

2.) A bit harder... dd the entire drive into an empty VM.
-This would involve creating a blank VM on another drive.
-Booting into that VM with a Live CD and establishing a network interface.
-Using dd to copy the entire source drive image (from the host) back onto the target device inside the VM via ssh.
-I've done this with virtualbox a few times... (even used this method to shink a VM)

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