I have a general question about virtual machines. I have installed Zorin as a virtual machine in Windows using VirtualBox.
When creating a virtual machine, is the guest operating system written to the real hard disk (because you have to specify how much space on the hard disk you want to use for it) or is the real hard disk not written to so that it doesn't matter when often new virtual machines are installed? Does this wear out the hard disk (SSD) or not?
I'm asking because my last VM (LinuxMint) stopped working after adding the guest extensions and I had to delete it immediately after installation and am now trying a new VM with Zorin. But this time adding the guest extension didn't work either. Fortunately, it did not end with a hang-up at the login screen, but it was reported that some characters could not be read. I'm not sure if this is due to an unknown font or what it means.
If you are using a thumb drive the image may have become corrupted. How VM Software works is space has to be allocated from free space available on your hard drive. Vitual Box creates a separate folder for its images. You might want to shrink C:\ partition using Disk Management in Windows and allocate the space to Virtual Box, but you might get a better solution on their forums.
With regard to virt-manager on GNU/Linux virt-manager's default location is in /var - this is why I never use the default storage that virt-manager allocates as it would soon fill up and make the system inoperable. That is why I create a folder called 'storage' in my /home folder for the default pool and always choose that.
Hello Swarfendor, thank you very much for trying to help me. I'm afraid I don't quite understand your answer. I do not use a USB stick. The VM is installed on drive C (under my user directory), which still has 46 GB of free disk space. It is not the computer of my profile.
Yes, it writes to the disk. Both the information about the VM itself and any virtual storage devices that you attach to it i.e.: how much space you want to allocate to it.
This required so that you can keep data inside the VM after reboot.
It depends on how VirtualBox works, but probably not. You can create a file that is 15 GB to reserve that space in the drive, and it would appear as if that space is taken, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the allocated space for that drive is written to. Now, if the actual install takes 8 GB, or whatever, then yes that will actually be written to disk.
That only means that there are 15 GB of space reserved in the disk. Whenever the VM needs to write something to disk, it will write it there to that file. If it reaches the limit, it will cause an error as if there were no more disk space. This system prevents the VM from taking over the drive, and limits its access to the amount designated by that file.
I don't know which you personally create but I always preferred .vhd over .vdi and chose the 'flexible' option so that the .vhd expands to accommodate for new applications.