Advice: Install MX on VM on external HDD [Solved]

[m_pav]

I have much to say on this subject but your combination of an Ultra-low power (4.8w DesignSpec) 6.0w processor running the horrendous behemoth Win11 is already an over-extension for this hardware level. I seriously doubt your intended purpose will be fulfilled with a Desktop Linux guest OS running on this machine without introducing some serious faults.

It will be possible, however, my expectations are extremely low for what you hope to achieve based on the primary OS and function of this machine, possibly to the extent of causing repeated system failures at the host OS level, such as blue-screen events.

The extreme bottleneck of a spinning platter HDD with only 8MB Cache with both the VM Host and the VM Guest running through the same USB ports is a minefield waiting to explode.

I highly doubt web browsing will be possible, the volume of IO operations along with the cache data being written to and read from the USB attached HDD will likely be a serious choke point leading to endless timeout faults. If music playback is possible, I am certain it will frequently be choppy and maybe even impossible to gain enjoyment from. Movie streaming will only take the extremes to the next level, at best, I would envision a 480kbps bit-rate would still be close to unusable.

Now if you had an external SSD in good condition, that would be another matter, a good number of the IO related issues would disappear, but the host OS will still feel it and could still falter.

In all scenarios, it would be nigh on impossible to mask that a VM host app was installed, unless you could first take a full-disk-recovery snapshot of the machine before you started and if/when it all goes pear shaped, restore that image, but it in every possible scenario, it will not be possible to avoid having to reboot the machine, thereby breaking your first law of engagement, that the machine must be accessible at all times.