[ale] Ubuntu in Oracle's VirtualBox (not)

[damon at damtek.com]

Ahhhhh, yes.  That familiar panic feeling when you vm asks "are you sure you want to format your hard disk and wipe out all your data?".  It was not talking about your REAL sda. It was only seeing and asking about the VIRTUAL sda.  Don't believe it? Do this: add two VIRTUAL disks in virtualbox. Boot up to your Linux ISO. Install to sdb and ignore sda ( but you may have to install grub to the VIRTUAL sda in order to boot up.
What you saw and thought is VERY common and you should pause EVERY SINGLE TIME before you hit enter to continue. There is no returning if you are wrong. However, the vm does not know anything about your physical (phy) box and it's disks. The vm only know about the VIRTUAL (virt) disks defined for it by virtual box and nothing more.
You can poke around the settings of virtualbox and change the definitions of your drives. You can make them appear as IDE drives or SATA drives, or even SCSI drives, if I remember correctly.
You have nothing to fear here. Go and format your drive as long as you are using virtualbox and install that Linux ( or windows, or BSD) and take it for a ride. Good instincts, but bad results due to not understanding you were being asked about the virt drives that only exist in software and files, not phy drives your host system was accessing (windows?).
I hope this helps.
Damon
--
Sent from myMail app for Android Wednesday, 14 October 2015, 08:49PM -04:00 from John Caruso < misrerenobis at aol.com> :

>I installed it and when I got to the point where it wanted to use dev/sda as a boot point I feared for my hard drive so I stopped the installation but it continued and ran the desktop just fine. I checked some things like the browser and the Office substitutes and then quit. Today I fired it up again and go a "no boot device" error so I had to get rid of it. If anyone has had success with this method let me know. I have given up trying to run any distro "alongside' another system. 
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