I'm trying to determine if I have sufficient drive storage resources for Windows 7 to run in Virtualbox. I am running Ubuntu 18.04 in a 50GB ext4 partition on a 1GB Hard drive (Partition 5 below).
Partition 1 is ntfs from ex-Windows 7. Since it is 75% full of needed data, resizing that partition is not possible.
There is also a 50GB Extended Partition. AFAIK it is unused.
The Ubuntu partition (Partition 5) has about 25GB free space. Is this enough disk space? And if not, is it possible for the virtual Windows 7 to run in another partition, or in part of another partition?
As a strictly side question, Ubuntu software has Virtualbox version 5.2.34, while the Virtualbox website has version 6.1.6. Which one would be safest/necessary for my purpose, and not having used this application before?
I thought I would try this out myself. When you setup the VM Virtualbox suggests 32GB for Windows 7 which I used for the dynamically allocated disk. Once installed The file containing the new install was just over 7.1 GB. It will obviously require more space as you add programs and data.
On reflection you probably can use your old Windows partition to hold the file containing the Windows 7 install. To do this you will need to mount the old Windows partition with read/write access and point the VM to a location on that partition. If you do it this way you might want to use a fixed size virtual disk for speed reasons. You could get a lot of fragmentation on NTFS using a dynamically allocated disk and if there is no working windows left on that disk it might be difficult to defragment.
Virtualbox 5.x will certainly run Windows 7 fine. You haven’t said what you plan to use this VM for so it’s hard to say if Virtualbox 6.x will be any better. If you upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 Virtualbox 6.1.6 is the version available in the software centre