# Installing FreeBSD normally and then booting it in a VM



## skenizen (Sep 19, 2018)

I'd like to install FreeBSD on a partition or a full disk and then being able to either boot it using the native hardware of the machine or running it as a guest from a VM on another system as a raw disk.
Is there any reasons why I could not do such setup and if it's possible are there issues I should be aware of?
I haven't found documentation on that specific setup but it might be because I don't know how to word it properly to find them, so if you have some knowledge relative to this, I'll welcome your advice.

Additional information:
I'm thinking of using UFS for the filesystem as that machine is a Core i7 and doesn't have ECC RAM.
I will be using X11 and the nvidia proprietary drivers (main reason I need it to boot natively).
The other system would be Windows 10. I'm not yet sure which virtual machine software using. I already have VirtualBox and Hyper-V available, but could consider purchasing Vmware Workstation if it handles that setup better.


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## SirDice (Sep 19, 2018)

skenizen said:


> I will be using X11 and the nvidia proprietary drivers (main reason I need it to boot natively).


The NVidia drivers aren't going to work in a VM.


skenizen said:


> I'm not yet sure which virtual machine software using. I already have VirtualBox and Hyper-V available, but could consider purchasing Vmware Workstation if it handles that setup better.


VirtualBox should be fine. Hyper-V too but I have very little experience running FreeBSD on a Hyper-V VM.


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## skenizen (Sep 19, 2018)

SirDice said:


> The NVidia drivers aren't going to work in a VM.


I was expecting that. Is there a way to have drivers loading conditionally at boot depending on current hardware?


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## SirDice (Sep 20, 2018)

The kernel driver probably isn't going to cause problems, that will just fail to load, it won't detect NVidia hardware and bailout. It's probably the Xorg configuration that's going to be an issue. But that's all theoretical, I've never had to set something like this up.


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## skenizen (Sep 21, 2018)

Thanks for the information, I'll try it, and see how it goes.


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