Migrate Win10 Guest from Win10 Host to Ubuntu Host?

[BrianMJC]

Hello,

I've gone back and forth with Windows over the years, and finally had enough of WIndows 10 on my laptop. I am ready to actually format my drive and use Ubuntu Linux as my Host system, running Windows 10 as a Guest system via VirtualBox for my necessary Windows programs.

But I need to do this in steps. I really don't have the time to spend doing all this work in one day, and I cannot be without a working laptop for any length of time for business.

So, my plan is to install and setup a Windows 10 guest system on my present Windows 10 host system. This way, I can continue working in the host system as I work on setting up the guest. Once setup, I will wipe and install Linux and import the Win 10 guest into VirtualBox with Linux as the host.

So my question is this. If I do this, will there be trouble? I understand hardware changes can be problematic with migrating Windows to different computers, and while it'll be on the same laptop (with the same hardware), I don't understand enough about VirtualBox to know if that makes some or all hardware appear differently to the Guest systems. I just really want to avoid finding out after many hours of labor that this won't work...

Thanks!

[socratis]

If you use the same laptop and just change operating systems, there will be no hardware changes (obviously). Only software ones (the OS) and VirtualBox doesn't care about that ^[1]. Take also a look at the Moving a VM topic to see the appropriate way of migrating your VMs and all of its settings. A couple of things might need tweaking after the migration, but they're minor; bridged networking (because the network card name will change) and shared folders (because the path will not be the same).

Other than that, it sounds like a very good plan to me. Oh, one last thing; since you're going to Ubuntu, you might be tempted to install VirtualBox from their online store. Don't. It installs the distro-fork which isn't supported in these forums. Stick to the official downloads (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads).

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[1] Unless there is a very specific bug with a very specific release on the very specific OS.

[BrianMJC]

Thanks so much, socratis. I'll be sure to check back in and report how it goes.