There are several ways, but they are all quite involved. Reading the comments Helix’s comment seems the easiest, given that VirtualBox can really use raw disks, which I have not heard of before. To this I wish to add, if this method works you don’t need to worry about drivers. The linux kernel has all the drivers you are likely to need & initrd is taken care of by all the distro installers, so you just need to directly install from the iso normally & not use an automated installer if VirtualBox has such options.
I don’t have USB drives and they cost too much for something i never use.
If you care about Linux it’s worth getting a usb drive, $4 gets you a usable drive in most parts of the world. (8GB is enough)
If you end up getting one, my suggestion is to make it a ventoy drive, even if you only have one iso file on the drive (which you’ll need to boot in grub2 mode) , you’ll still get the recovery benefit of ventoy, meaning if something* happens to your linux bootloader, ventoy will still be able to boot it up np most of the time.
*If you have two separate EFI partitions on two disks it’s unlikely that Windows would touch the other, but stranger things have happened.
There are several ways, but they are all quite involved. Reading the comments Helix’s comment seems the easiest, given that VirtualBox can really use raw disks, which I have not heard of before. To this I wish to add, if this method works you don’t need to worry about drivers. The linux kernel has all the drivers you are likely to need & initrd is taken care of by all the distro installers, so you just need to directly install from the iso normally & not use an automated installer if VirtualBox has such options.
If you care about Linux it’s worth getting a usb drive, $4 gets you a usable drive in most parts of the world. (8GB is enough)
If you end up getting one, my suggestion is to make it a ventoy drive, even if you only have one iso file on the drive (which you’ll need to boot in grub2 mode) , you’ll still get the recovery benefit of ventoy, meaning if something* happens to your linux bootloader, ventoy will still be able to boot it up np most of the time.
*If you have two separate EFI partitions on two disks it’s unlikely that Windows would touch the other, but stranger things have happened.