- Joined
- May 14, 2024
see. the problem is i have a bunch of drives. all for my old windows install. and because im a data hoarder i refuse to change them. i have no more space for drives.
i will probably need to remedy this because im sure my linux drive will fill up eventually.
i guess i could buy a big ass ssd and transport all my windows things onto one drive. We are talking terabytes of data. mostly steam games tbh.
my main thing is i want my windows to be untouched. but its spread across like 5 drives. maybe i will transport my windows into a completely different pc idk.
TL: DR i have no more expansion room unless i start reclaiming windows drives.
This is fucking lunacy. Hey, retard, when one of these drives die what's your plan? You don't have to tell me you don't have a backup because it's obvious. On top of that you're hoarding steam games on a filesystem without checksumming so it's basically the lowest value hoarding I could imagine. I also really doubt you can notice a difference between an NVME and SATA ssd unless you're doing huge bulk file operations so moving things between them is probably a waste of time and just another chance to fuck up.i tried isolating my windows install to one drive and then installed everything else everywhere else. and id order them by importance. so stuff i use a lot got the good drive and then stuff i rarely use or downloads got sent to the bulk hdd.
games got the SSDs with my favs being on an nvme and then stuff i played frequently but less often were on a sata ssd.
its a fuckin mess.
Passing an entire disk to a virtual machine is easy and you can boot windows from it, you can even still boot that copy of windows normally if you don't change anything. You should not do this with "portable [USB]" drives because usb controllers are shit and will break things. If you want 3d acceleration however you either need a 2nd gpu that you pass through or something that supports SR-IOV and then some way to actually see the output like looking glass (win10+) or directly attach a monitor.is it possible to install windows onto a portable ssd and then boot that into a VM? I wan to access windows for a few specific programs but i dont want to use my actual drive space for it
something like this
alternatively how safe is it to pass my current windows ssd into a VM? i dont want to bork my windows install.
Sort of unclear on your requirements (do you need to boot windows on bare metal? do you need 3d acceleration in windows?) but I would say you should consolidate all your windows drives into one VM image on top of a checksumming filesystem (be that on top of a big HDD or some type of raid across your other faster storage) and then get a usable back up.
However if we're being honest given this shitshow I think your data is basically as good as gone anyway so idk if it's worth the effort + chances you make a mistake (no backups meaning any mistake is fatal). Then again you seem to live dangerously so #YOLO.

