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While installing Ubuntu in VirtualBox, the installer indicated it was going to erase all existing data on the disk. Does this only refer to the area I have allocated during setup or my entire hard drive. It seems obvious but it's quite a mistake to make since I'm not sure. Help.

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  • Thanks for all the responses. I assumed what you are all saying, but I'd rather know than assume,
    – Steve R
    May 18, 2017 at 1:14

3 Answers 3

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There are a couple of things to know and a couple of things to check.

First off, virtualbox is a way to isolate and create a miniature machine inside of a bigger machine. This being said once you have created the disk space for the Virtual Machine, all it sees it that small space you gave it.

enter image description here

In the above picture you see the Virtual Box set up screen, this is the main screen where you set the size of disk for the Operating system. Once this has been set and you go through the other settings you are good.

At this point you will start the Virtual Machine, the way Virtual Box works is that that machine only sees that disk, it thinks that it is on a computer all by itself with whatever sized hard drive you set. So you can go ahead and set it to fill that size, but I still check during set up that the disk size is what I allocated during the Machine Setup in the picture above.

From here you should be good to go to set it up and run it.

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Ubuntu is telling you it will use the entire disk, yes, but since Ubuntu is running under virtualization, the "entire disk" is referring to the virtual disk you very probably created when creating the virtual machine in the first place. The virtual disk, by default, is just a large file on your actual physical disk.

It is possible to tell VirtualBox to use an actual physical disk for your virtual machine, but that's not the default behaviour, and you have to go out of your way a little bit to set it up as such. So, unless you actually took those extra steps, my first paragraph is almost certainly what applies to your situation.

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This refers to the area you allocated during setup. If you set it up properly you only chose a small portion of your existing hard drive and you are safe to move forward. I've run that setup on Macs many times. Expect Ubuntu to tell you something similar when it installs onto that virtual drive you just created.

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