[sf-lug] My latest NUC adventure

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Akkana Peck (akkana at shallowsky.com):

> 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.

I could be wrong, but what I hear is that if you migrate a Windows
installation (say, via VMware's free-of-charge downloadable p2v tool, 
VMware vCenter Converter, http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/) to
a virtual machine, you will of course need to face Microsoft's Product
Activation process again, but what I heard was that you just telephone
them as directed and explain you've moved Windows to a VM, and they're
reported to be reasonable about this.  

I'd be interested to hear from someone who's been through the matter.
In my case, I haven't had MS-Windows on my own machines since Windows
for Workgroups 3.11, so I have no relevant experience -- but over on
CABAL's Conspire mailing list we've discussed the technical details of
such a migration a number of times.  Recapping briefly:

1.  Non-destructively shrink your Windows partition with one of the
usual tools, so it's no bigger than it needs to be.
2.  Attach a big USB-connected external drive, which I suppose should
have a big ext4 partition on it.  From a live distro, run the p2v tool 
for Linux to image the Windows parttion to a big honkin' .vmdk file on the
external USB drive.  This might take an hour.
3.  To be totally safe and not risk burning any bridges, extract the
Windows drive, set it aside as a spare, and put a different blank
drive into the computer.  (This step can be skipped if one is 
confident, but I wouldn't.)
4.  Install native Linux.  Install VirtualBox for Linux.  Copy 
the .vmdk file back from the big external drive.  Create a new
VM called 'Windows' and point it to the file from the big USB drive, 
and make sure the VM boots correctly.  (VirtualBox can read .vmdk
files.)  Windows will require Windows Product Activation again, so
that's where you call Microsoft.

At the end of this fire-drill, you've moved MS-Windows into a VM _and_ 
you have a safety copy of installed Windows on the extracted hard drive
plus (if you wish to keep it) an off-system-stored .vmdk snapshot of
that same installation.  Plus, you'll be able to use your preferred 
OS as the main (host) OS, while still having concurrent access to 
MS-Windows applications in a VM when you need them.

I'll admit I've not tested the procedure, because I've not needed
it.  But this might be an alternative (for which I also have no use
case):

> 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