virtualbox.org

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!

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.

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