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I have a dual boot setup with Ubuntu 18.04 and Windows 10, on separate disks.

Disk A has the ESP partition and the Ubuntu partition. Disk B has the windows partitions.

When I tried to pass the disks to virtualbox in order to access Windows from within Ubuntu I realized that Windows is trying to mount the entire disk A instead of just the ESP partition, which is not possible since its under use by Ubuntu.

Can I somehow force windows to mount just the ESP partition?

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  • I don't understand what you're trying to do, how Virtualbox fits the equation and why one would need to "pass the disks"...
    – user931000
    Commented Nov 17, 2018 at 13:24
  • To put simply, I want to boot both OS of the dual boot setup at the same time. Virtualbox has an internal command called createrawvmdk that you can use to pass a host device to the guest, making booting both of the OS possible. Since I'm using UEFI, just passing the windows disk is not enough, it needs the ESP partition as well. I can give windows the ESP partition, but it needs to mount the whole disk containing the ESP. This is where I'm stuck
    – Shawn Li
    Commented Nov 17, 2018 at 14:07
  • Running a virtual machine is not booting both at the same time. Yes, there is a method to make an installed OS into a virtual disk that can run as VM but I'm not sure it works with UEFI or how to do it. It seems a very complicated procedure for no real gain. Knowing that you actually need a different license for running Windows in a VM, perhaps just installing another Windows as a VM would be much easier to do. And I'm not sure you understand virtualization and its limitations. I'm afraid you're having unrealistic expectations.
    – user931000
    Commented Nov 17, 2018 at 14:26

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The solution I decided to take was to reinstall windows by making sure there is no other disks in the system that has ESP partition at the time of installation. This will force windows to create a new ESP partition and thus there is no need for it to mount other disks.

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