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ijverig
ijverig

Reputation: 2945

Sharing OS between real and virtual machine

Is it feasible to have a virtual machine running an OS on a local disk (not the one with the guest system) and booting the real machine from that same disk?

I'd like to do it with both linux and Windows. Is it possible?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 72

Answers (1)

prl
prl

Reputation: 12434

If you use separate partitions on the disk for the two OSes, then it works with no problem. But I think you mean that you want both instances of the OS to use the same partition, so the answer is no. There are many files in both Linux and Windows that are modified by the system while it is running. If two different instances of the OS are running and trying to update these files at the same time, it will result in chaos.

It would be possible to share the read-only parts of the system, and have separate copies of the writable parts, but that would be fairly tricky to set up. And it would result in two separate OSes on the disk, albeit with some shared files, so I don't think it really meets the premise of your question.

Upvotes: 1

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