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Is there any danger in booting an existing Windows 10 in a VM on separate SSD and accessing a shared data partition?

Ask Ubuntu Asked by ayyu on November 26, 2021

I was looking into booting into my existing W10 installation that is already on a separate SSD from my Ubuntu installation on a dual-boot machine, as in: Running a real Windows install in VirtualBox on Linux

All of my data/documents are stored on a 3rd HDD, such that

/dev/nvme0n1p1  NTFS Windows 10 LTSC install (noauto,nouser)
/dev/sda1       exFAT shared data partition (currently mounted at boot by Ubuntu)
/dev/sdb1       Ubuntu 20.04 install

Is there any risk in having the shared data partition on /dev/sda1 mounted simultaneously by both the VM and Ubuntu? Will I be likely to lose data on this HDD by using it this way? If so, is there an alternative way of setting this up to make it safer? I pretty much need both OS to be able to access this data partition.

Edit: The data partition contains MySQL data and htdocs folder. It also contains some Office files (Word/Excel etc) that I need to open. It also contains some Office files (Word/Excel etc) that I need to open. I’d only have one instance of LAMP/XAMPP stack running at a time. I am more worried about the Office files being corrupted by possibly being accessed from both machines at once.

One Answer

I use multiple OS on the same data every day. Dual-boot vs. virtualization will make no difference. Your workflow is what keeps your data integrity.

If your data is in a database, then it's easy: Responding to read/write queries from multiple sources is what database applications do. One application on one OS owns the database - all other applications on all OS communicate with that application (not the data directly).

If your data is in non-database tables and files, then you must create your own rules for which applications are allowed to read/write (and when). Keeping different applications from trying to read/write the same file at the same time is mostly an exercise in scheduling.

Answered by user535733 on November 26, 2021

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