[sf-lug] My latest NUC adventure

[Akkana Peck]

Rick Moen writes:
> So, here's a suggestion:  Now would be a really, really good time to
> make sure you understand completely, and document off-system for your
> future reference, the booting chain you've established for both OSes. 

That is such a good idea. More than once, I've needed to do
maintenance on a machine that had several OSes on it, and found a
mess where I had trouble finding out things like which partition
owned the grub that it was booting from given that there were
multiple partitions each with its own grub.

> IMO, it would be (adequacy of RAM permitting) a lot smarter to first
> install a base OS using the entire mass storage -- which IMO ought to be
> a Linux distro that will serve as your primary environment -- and then
> install any additional OSes as VM 'guest' OSes using a hypervisor layer
> such as VirtualBox.  

What a perfect time for this topic to (re-)arise, since I just spent
the morning researching that very question. I'm thinking about
buying a new laptop, one with an SSD. Since it will invariably come
with Windows OEM, and since every now and then it would be nice to be
able to check out an ebook from the library without having to ask my
husband to do it on his Mac (Adobe Digital Editions stopped working
in Wine a couple of years ago), and since SSDs are small and Windows
is large, I'd like to move that OEM Windows to a Virtualbox instance
on an external spinner disk.

The best lead I found was to read the laptop's hardware product key
and set a Virtualbox "BIOS passthrough" as described here:
https://superuser.com/questions/1313241/install-windows-10-from-an-unbooted-oem-drive-into-virtualbox
But I also found lots of pages saying it was impossible. I'm hoping
those are from people who didn't know about BIOS passthrough.

Anyone actually done it, moved Windows 10 OEM to Virtualbox?
Are those instructions reasonable, or is there a better way?

        ...Akkana (whose last Windows was WinME)