As others mentioned, you used to be able to copy a raw disk to a file, and run whatever OS that was there as VM.  I did that with Qemu/kvm, but it was dog slow, and never got GUI to work properly.  Nowadays, too many things are hardware locked, eg. secureboot, TPM, bitlocker, UEFI, BIOS, etc.

What you seem to want is 2 OS running at the same time, on separate monitor.  You would need to rewrite Linux as "mainframe".


On 2025-09-15 09:10, CAREY SCHUG via Talk wrote:
A linux distro that instead of setting up dual boot, will automatically make a virtual copy of the boot partition and bring up the original OS in a virtual machine.  The preferred configuration would be with a dedicated second display (since they are so cheap and universally available), but if only one display is available, it could create a generic virtual display a bit smaller than the host machine's display.  It would be an option whether the VM would be brought up at every boot or only upon a simple command request.  Another option would be with a second disk installed, so the original operating system's disk is left unchanged (or perhaps the partition shrunk to make room for a shared data partition, in which the original boot partition would have to be virtualized to protect the space removed from that operating system's exclusive control).
 
when I asked simple ai-search, i was told such did not exist yet, and it would be difficult to run gaming in the VM, but I don't care if gaming will run there.
 
Even cooler, with a second disk installed, would be to boot either OS (either disk) native, and automatically bring the other one up virtual...
 
"standard" process:
--shrink original primary partition to make room for linux
--make partitions as desired and install linux in the new area
--create disk image of boot cylinders/partition table, modified to not include linux and end where it starts
--if desired, (not sure of details) duplicate  virtual images of UEFI for linux or the original os, or make additional real partitions.  I don't think they can share them, can they?
--put linux boot into real boot cylinders
--concatenate the virtual disk of the original boot cylinders with all of the other original OS partitions into a virtual disk used for booting the original OS in a virtual machine.
 
Any naysayers saying "can't do that" or "too hard" will get my usual refrain... 
 

Carey


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