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I have two separate hard drives in my computer.

The first is Kubuntu. The second is Windows 10.

I've successfully gotten the Win10 drive botted and running in VirtualBox. However, VirtualBox does not support the passthrough of a GPU. And because the software I need to use in Win10 is very graphics heavy (Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, etc - I use them for work, please don't suggest alternatives. These are the best option for what I do for a living - I've tried GIMP and other options already, this is not what I'm asking about).

VirtualBox just doesn't offer the graphics support that I need to successfully do what I need to do with Win10 in a VM. But having Win10 in a VM is exactly what I need as completely shutting down my laptop, and rebooting it into Win10 every time I need to do a quick thing for work just.... isn't condusive for a good workflow and/or an easy workflow. Being able to pop in and out of Win10 as needed for specific tasks while running Kubuntu as my main OS is preferable across the board for me.

I know that QEMU-KVM has better graphics support. I already have that, and Virt-Manager installed in Kubuntu.

The question is - how do I transfer from VirtualBox to Virt-Manager/QEMU? Everything I've been able to find has been for if you've got partitions, and how this is bad, and basically don't do it.

To reiterate - I don't have partitions. I have two separate physical drives. 1 Kubuntu and 1 Win10. I've already got the Win10 drive running as a VM in VirtualBox. I just need to move the "VM" from one to the other.

EDIT: I've been able to get the drive to boot into UEFI Interactive bootloader, but no farther. I know which internal drive windows is. I know which partition is which on said drive. But I absolutely CANNOT seem to get farther than the UEFI loader.

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If you used physical disk drive as a VM storage you don't need to transfer anything, just create a new KVM VM (via virt-manager/qemu) and plug the drive. But if you cloned your Windows drive into virtual drive image you need to convert this image into qemu format.

vboxmanage clonehd --format RAW example.vdi example.img
qemu-img convert -f raw example.img -O qcow2 example.qcow2

Then you can use your qcow2 image with KVM.

Keep in mind that you can also set up dual boot with GRUB or use Windows Subsystem for Linux instead.

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  • I have a physical hard drive. Not a cloned VM. The drive isn't in an external housing. It's inside my laptop. I've tried to add it as the storage device in virt-manager but can't seem to get it to boot.
    – Serenova
    Jun 27, 2022 at 17:46
  • Also, to address your GRUB comment - that's what I had, but it interrupts my workflow too much to have to completely shut down my computer and reboot in a different OS, hence the VM solution.
    – Serenova
    Jun 27, 2022 at 21:54

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