>>Running Windoze client VMs on older Ubuntu with VirtualBox was no real problem, guess with Antix (my current favorite at least as VM client) it will be similar. But I would prefer to start host OS from an easy to save vhd instead of a normal install.
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>>Anybody tried something like that ?
>
>If your alphabet soup means multiboot, yes you can and I haven't tried it for a number of years now. The trick is to install the linux last, because it won't destroy the boot records of others. Windoze is autistic and unaware of the rest of the world, so it always destroys everybody else's boot records when installing. So add your linux in the end, in its own partition, and let GRUB handle the boot menu.

Yupp, been there done that. But its *not* what I am after. When installing Linux to run on the bare metal, each install creates several partitionson the raw disk: boot, home, swap, sometimes temp. If you create a VM to run under Virtualbox, .vhd or .vdi file(s) is/are seen as "raw disk(s)" and boot, home, swap are typically created inside a single vhd file, but you can also have just /boot in 1 vhd, a common vhd as /home and a single /swp as long as only 1 VM accesses it, saving space.

Windoze (includind Win10) can hard boot from a vhd, if the boot manager is told so, similar to having several SCSI discs in your machine and entries pointing to a directory in each of them as "boot directory", which was a bit hard to svae from inside. So if the boot manager can read a large partition, you can point it to one of several .vhd files there to run as bare machine host system, without Hyper-V involved. With Grub4Dos a single VM is given the option to elect the boot vhd the VM loads. See:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fdx4hvbKR4

I want the same option for a bare metal Linux OS: boot from one of several .Vhd files (which are treated as raw disks) into the host OS.

Cherry on top is the option to copy said .vhd to USB and take your typical machine with you to run bare metal elsewhere, perhaps accessing other .vhd "raw disks" on a external SSD.

explained better now?
thomas

9fdx4hvbKR4