Indeed! I just don't have much need for them usually. I have a very large one plugged into my stereo with a massive music collection.
And, living where I do its by internet order.
I could tell you about my first hard drive - a supermassive 100Mb SCSI drive for the Atari STe... which held all my apps and data with ease. They don't make 'em like that anymore 
I remember those days. £329 for the 1 Gb SCSI drive and £80 for the Controller it was attached to on the Amiga A1500!
Could this be done with a USB SSD? Before I go ordering anything.
Hello Neil, I wish you had quoted the specific part of his post you have a question about. If you mean, can you put a Linux ISO onto a USB SSD, and boot off of it, the answer is yes. As long as your computer is from 2012 or newer, you can use a USB SSD is a boot drive.
Please note however, USB NVME based SSD drives, require a computer from 2018 or newer, as its newer technology, and old computer BIOS's are not coded for the use of it.
However, if you are asking if you can put software or a VM onto an external SSD drive, you should be able to do that, you just got to tell the computer or software, to direct to that drive. And make sure that drive is always auto mounted at boot.
I've reduced to 8MB RAM and 4 cores. |If anything its more sluggish and jerky - just moving the mouse on the desktop is jerky.
Sorry! Shall do.
Its a new notebook, so should be fine by what you say.
I meant, the procedure outlined by j_luz to install VM on external SSD and boot from it.
Thanks!
EDIT: Using another partition to share work between Zorin OS and Windows10.vhd is not needed as I explain in post below this one. Also, using the Ventoy vlnk plugin to boot to a .vhd stored on an internal drive of your computer is not needed, as I explain the same post below this one.
So funny, I'm at lunch and I came in here to suggest using an external SSD drive set up as described above, instead of a USB. Because I got to thinking about your workload probably quickly degrading a USB.
Either that or squeezing off enough of your main OS on your internal drive that you can make an NTFS partition in the size you need for the VHD, then installing Ventoy on a small USB and including the file mentioned previously in the "ventoy" directory you create and in addition using the Ventoy vlink plug in and copying the resulting link file to the USB. This way you could boot with the USB, select the vlink and Ventoy would boot the VHD on your internal drive.
Either way would be more appropriate to a heavy workload than a USB.
And in either case, I would also recommend keeping a small portion saved for storage so you can access things you work on in Windows very easily in Zorin.
So for example if you go the external SSD route, choose to "leave some space* at the end of the SSD when you install Ventoy on it, make that an NTFS partition and while working in Windows set your storage up to save to that "disk" instead of internal locations in the win.vhd. Or for the internal drive route, saying you squeezed off 100GB from your main OS, you can make that 2 NTFS partitions like 60/40 or 70/30, one for win.vhd and one for storage.
I do wish you had a spare USB handy to test it out first.
Excellent suggestions. Thank you so much. I shall try first on a USB for test purposes, hopefully proceed to SSD after, as you suggest here. However, I won't try this for a week or two. I have a lot of work occupying my attention! And thats a good thing.
Well, I only use .vhd to make disposable systems that I can set up to specification for easy replication, boot, modify things, and delete it when I'm done. Copy a master .vhd and repeat. Without messing up or modifying my real system.
But I was thinking, your case will be somewhat different since you will be using it as a tool for your work load. So I tested 2 more things out when I got home so that I could give you a better report.
Test 1: Ventoy vlnk plugin. I wanted to see if this was actually necessary or if, since the documentation also mentions using F2 to browse local files, you could simply browse to a win10.vhd on an NTFS partition on an internal drive.
For this test I copied the 50GB win10.vhd to a 100GB NTFS partition on my internal HDD.
I used a Ventoy formatted USB, large partition reformatted to NTFS, with the ventoy directory I made on the NTFS side, and the appropriate ventoy_vhdboot.img in the ventoy directory.
I booted to the USB and when the Ventoy menu appeared I pressed F2 and scrolled to the NTFS partition I had created, selected the copied win10.vhd and booted into it with no problem.
I decided to repeat this procedure on the Linux side for thoroughness. I rebooted into my Ventoy USB and F2 to pull up the local disk. I scrolled to the master zorin17.vhd.vtoy which I have stored on my new NVMe drive. This also booted with no problem.
So the vlnk plug is not necessary, it may predate the F2 menu, or also it may offer additional functionality (such as if you are making a custom Ventoy menu and want to use the vlnk in it to boot to local disk).
Test2: By copying the win10.vhd in a partition larger than the capacity of the vhd, was it strictly necessary to create another NTFS partition to use as a "drop box" between Zorin and Windows?
For this test I made a directory named Storage in the NTFS partition that housed the win10.vhd. I put some test document in it. I rebooted my pc and booted into the Ventoy USB. I used F2 to navigate to the win10.vhd on my HDD and booted into it. The rest of the partition shows up in My PC as another drive (F: in my case) and I was able to access the documents I have put in the partition and add more documents from the win10.vhd
Anyway hope these further tests save you some time. I will edit my original post to reflect my findings.
Just to clarify for anyone following the topic to not be confused. We are not going to be creating a whole virtual machine. We are only going to use software such as VirtualBox, which will provide us a base vm that we can install an operating system onto a virtual disk that is in a Ventoy supported format, such as .vhd. Once we have our .vhd created, we are going to ape Windows "native boot" feature by using Ventoy to boot our virtual disk on our actual machine so that we can use our real hardware at real speed to run our virtual disk. As such, the operating system will now install additional drivers etc as fit for your real computer - not the virtual machine the virtual disk was originally created for.
Thank you so much for taking the time to investigate this, I'm really overwhelmed by the support!
Do I correctly have the impression that this will be much easier to manage the win10 instance than a traditional dual boot? Whilst giving the full power of the hardware.
USB sticks on their way...
Thats what sets us apart from some other web forums, we don't have a superiority complex, and were here to help and guide.
It really depends on what you're using it for. In your case, I'd say you could just as easily set up a traditional dual boot. The only advantage here being that it's a lot less finicky than setting up a Linux/Windows dual boot 'on the same drive', but if you are getting another drive anyway...
If this was a Linux/Linux situation the advantage would be clear, as you could store your .vhd files in a VHD directory within your main system, and just boot into one of them as needed, without having to repartition your hard drive etc. But because this is Windows, the .vhd file will need to be on a file system that the boot loader recognizes when it first starts up, so you would have to repartition or shink your Zorin partition a little anyway to at least make a small NTFS "data" partition on your drive to house the win.vhd file.
OK, I understand. Thanks again.
So, I noticed the kernel had updated recently, and tried again in both virt-manager and Boxes.
Result! Smooth and fast. I haven't made any other changes to the config. A tamed, containered Win10 within which I can successfully do the work I need to run there.
I am still going to follow the suggestions of j_luz (next week, when I will have the time), as I expect that to be faster and more reliable. But for quickly nipping into that environment, I'm delighted that I can do this without leaving Zorin.
The good old days! haha. Also a Amiga user here (A500).
If you are now successfully using virt-manager then the VMS are .qcow2, not .vhd.
.vhd relates to Virtual Box.
What I didn't like in virt-manager was that I couldn't save snapshots - seems that doesn't work when you have a shared folder to the host.
I have also found a few times in virt-manager that I go back to my VM after a few days - and it crashes, when last time was fine.
Boxes has been far more stable for me. So far.
I'll use Virtual Box when it comes to setting up the vhd as discussed above.
That's interesting... Gnome Boxes uses the same underlying technology than Virt Manager does.
But using a separate drive can be cumbersome. Unfortunately the easiest option that I found for that is either run the CLI commands directly in the terminal, or edit the XML configuration files. This is far more effective, but most definitely not as user friendly.
I don't know if this applies to your situation, but I did a tutorial, on how to make Flatpak Steam, see an external drive, to use as a games library cache.
https://forum.zorin.com/t/how-to-setup-external-drives-with-steam-flatpak/8233/8
Flatseal can be used to make any Flatpak program, utilize your hardware. As great as Flatpak's are, the problem with them being containerized, is they don't have permissions to use hardware, and that causes problems.
