[SOLVED] How to move VDI into actual bootable linux physical?

[mlbl]

I'm using a VDI.vtoy file with linux on it to experiment, and am loving it - did a lot of customisations, but now I want to move it to an actual physical drive, just wondering is this possible and if so, how/best approach?

[longpanda]

Please refer:  https://www.ventoy.net/en/plugin_vtoyboot.html

• Boot vDisk at Local disk by Ventoy
  

[mlbl]

Sorry, maybe i'm not clear with my request. My vdi.vtoy file is in hard disk, but I want to move this to an actual EXT4 filesystem (like imagine installing linux on hard drive, move the contents of VDI vtoy) to the hard drive filesystem instead of on a virtual VDI file for better performance. hopefully that makes more sense, not sure if that's possible?

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one crazy method i was thinking is doing a full backup of the disk itself using dd or timeshift, then do something like:

1) Install Linux on EXT4 physical drive
2) Restore DD image / timeshift on EXT4 physical drive

Would that work i wonder?

[longpanda]

The vdi file is a disk image which contains partition table and contains more than one partitions.
So you can't just copy the content of the vdi to the external file system.

When you put a vdi file in a harddisk and boot from the vdi file.
There is almost no performance loss with that you install the system directly to the harddisk and boot it.
When ventoy boot a vdi file, it will use device-mapper to create a device and doesn't care about the ext/xfs/... file system the the vdi file in.
So there is almost no performance loss .

[mlbl]

The vdi file is a disk image which contains partition table and contains more than one partitions.
So you can't just copy the content of the vdi to the external file system.

When you put a vdi file in a harddisk and boot from the vdi file.
There is almost no performance loss with that you install the system directly to the harddisk and boot it.
When ventoy boot a vdi file, it will use device-mapper to create a device and doesn't care about the ext/xfs/... file system the the vdi file in.
So there is almost no performance loss .

Ah ok that's good to hear, guess i'll stick wth the VDI then - which is good as well as its easy for me to backup just one single file for my whole linux OS ! Thanks longpanda and happy chinese new year to you!