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I have a dual boot system with Win10 + Ubuntu 16.04 HWE kernel. I am trying to configure a Virtual Machine in Windows (in dev/sda) which can access the already installed Ubuntu (in /dev/sdb).

I am following the instructions at: Using a Physical Hard Drive Pariition as a VirtualBox VM and as a Bootable Partition

Two other links with similar topic covered: Link1 Link2

All of these mention that I have to copy /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/* to ~/Desktop/iso/boot/grub. However, these are the directories I see under /usr/lib/grub/:

grub-mkconfig_lib x86_64-efi x86_64-efi-signed

As I don't have i386-pc, which files do I need to copy over to create the GRUB Recovery ISO, which the Virtual Machine will use to boot into Ubuntu?

akshayj
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1 Answers1

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Your computer is EFI-based, but the instructions you reference assume a BIOS-mode installation. This is a poor assumption to be made in 2015, when the instructions were written.

I've only skimmed those instructions, and I'm not familiar with the procedure described, so I may be missing something, but instead of creating a GRUB rescue .iso file, you might want to try the CD-R image of my rEFInd boot manager. (See the download link for the CD-R image.) You'd then point VirtualBox to the rEFInd .iso file as a CD image file. If my cursory glance at the instructions is not leading me astray, rEFInd should be able to boot your regular Ubuntu installation from within VirtualBox. In the long term, you might consider setting up a small virtualized disk with a FAT filesystem and install rEFInd to it; this might persist across uses better than a pointer to a CD image file. (Under Linux, at least, VirtualBox frequently "unmounts" CD images without being asked -- or maybe that's Ubuntu itself.)

Rod Smith
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