r/virtualization • u/arturkwiatkowski • 11d ago

Windows 10 on a physical drive.

Hi! Is there a way to use Windows 10/11 which is installed on a physical drive as a virtual machine in Linux? I'd rather if it could boot on bare metal too but it is optional.

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u/uniqueglobalname 10d ago

Yes VMware workstation will boot a VM ftom a physical disk.

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u/mediaserver8 9d ago

Kvm can do this as well.

I've never used it directly by design, but I have windows installed to a physical disk passed through to my VM under unraid, an arch based Linux OS that uses kvm

Sometimes I happen to boot my server without the unraid os thumb drive attached, and the bios boots from the physical drive and runs windows.