[Discuss] Ubuntu Install Question

[grg-webvisible+blu at ai.mit.edu (grg)]

On Thu, Mar 07, 2019 at 06:05:36PM -0500, Rich Pieri wrote:
> Running your Ubuntu in Hyper-V is also an option to consider. Not only
> do most Linux distros run just fine in Hyper-V, installing Ubuntu
> 18.04.1 LTS in Hyper-V is formally supported.

How about the opposite?  I'm going to be receiving a windows laptop which I
want to convert to linux, but I feel it's prudent to retain the ability to
run the factory windows(*) that's already on there.  I'd like to run that
windows inside virtualbox on linux (rather than just dual-booting).

I figure I could either shrink the windows partition and then have virtualbox
just run windows from it, or I could move the windows partition contents
into a .vdi file in the laptop's One Filesystem to Rule Them All.(**)

Though I've heard it said that consumer-grade Windows won't be happy to
suddenly find itself running inside a vm, presumably some form of license
enforcement - I'm not sure if it's detecting its enclosing vm directly, or
if it's unhappy to be running from a different disk, or if people were
running it elsewhere and it sees the cpu has changed.

Any advice on whether to keep a windows partition or move to an image file?
Any particularly good (or bad) ways of going about this conversion?

Thanks!
--grg


(*) Windows because occasionally the need to run windows-only stuff pops up,
factory because that tends to work best with a laptop's specific devices
(even though I expect virtualbox will get in the way of some of that..)

(**) Since you mentioned them, I'm looking at zfs or btrfs, though I'm not
sure this affects much the main question here.