Use Physical Windows Partition as VirtualBox Guest for Linux Host

I have a Windows partition on my machine, because sometimes there are things wine can’t handle, and sometimes I need more performance than VirtualBox can handle.

However, I didn’t like keeping around a Windows VM AND my Windows partition. So I go to thinking, well, if a virtual disk is a file, and a regular disk is a file, I wonder if I can trick VirtualBox into using the real disk as it’s virtual disk, and just mount the partition under VirtualBox, while still letting me boot to that partition when I need the performance of a real machien.

Turns out you can. Someone else has already done a great job of documenting this process, so I’ll just link you to it. I also found this resource helpful.