Basically. I have separate drive for my windowsOS/media etc. And one of my nvme drive now is completely empty.
Is there a way to install Linux onto that empty nvme with windows and then like turn the PC off remove my windows drive entirely, and then have it just boot with the linux drive without needing to do a whole bootable usb through the motherboard uefi?
I don’t have USB drives and they cost too much for something i never use.
Like if there was a linux installer that Ibcan run while logged in to windows that would be amazing…
This is a tricky question, mostly because you tagged it as “Noob”… It is technically possible, but it does require jumping through some hoops I would not normally recommend to a novice. Attempting through a VM is probably the safest option, but pointing a VM to an entire physical disk isn’t typically something I would recommend, but is likely much safer than doing live partition editing manually and on the fly.
You can use a raw disk in VirtualBox. Just make sure you install an initrd and kernel which has drivers for all of your hardware. If you let something autodetect hardware, it will detect the virtual hardware, not the real one.
I’ve never tried it, but you can use UNetbootin to do that.
Wow, I did not know about this, very cool!
I think you can also use Ventoy over the network (which I have never tried either).
Yes there are lots of methods to do this. Format the disk to something like ext4, untar a distro to it, then with wsl chroot into the disk, finish installing and configuring everything, then reboot to the new disk. You will need specific time to do an this, but should be fairly straight forward.
I essentially did exactly this for my current setup.
There are other ways to.
I installed from inside vmware before, with the linux drive mounted natively, then removed the windows drive.
This feels wrong but I don’t know why. It just feels like it would break somewhere. I’ve never given a vm its own physical drive though.
When my freebsd home server died I just put it’s disks into my gaming rig and connected them to a VM and it booted with no hassle. It will work for linux too, unless you have architecture differences or some whacky secure boot setup, or highly customized kernel or something.
Passing physical drives through to a VM is the only way I install Windows anymore, that way it can’t fuck up my boot order or EFI partition, since I use Linux daily. Can’t wait for the day I don’t need Windows, alas, medical device update software often requires Windows/Mac, and passing the USB through to a VM doesn’t work.
I make a partition on my main drive which I load any .iso on to it. Usually I keep a Linux Mint .iso there in case I need a basic set of tools outside of my main Operating System for when I mess up my main OS. I can load that .iso partition at boot through the BIOS menu.
I’m sure you can do the same with an NVME drive. You may need to check the BIOS boot order to make sure you start your preferred OS when booting your system.
I used to do this too, I confirm this works and is a good idea, it is convenient especially if you plan to distrohop a bit or know you will reset a couple times to experiment a bit
You could use netboot.xyz: https://netboot.xyz/docs/booting/uefi
You might have a MicroSD or SD cars lying around which you can use as a USB stick with a $1 reader e.g. from Aliexpress.
