Will installing Ubuntu on VirtualBox erase data on the host OS?

Solution 1:

There are a couple of things to know and a couple of things to check.

First off, virtualbox is a way to isolate and create a miniature machine inside of a bigger machine. This being said once you have created the disk space for the Virtual Machine, all it sees it that small space you gave it.

In the above picture you see the Virtual Box set up screen, this is the main screen where you set the size of disk for the Operating system. Once this has been set and you go through the other settings you are good.

At this point you will start the Virtual Machine, the way Virtual Box works is that that machine only sees that disk, it thinks that it is on a computer all by itself with whatever sized hard drive you set. So you can go ahead and set it to fill that size, but I still check during set up that the disk size is what I allocated during the Machine Setup in the picture above.

From here you should be good to go to set it up and run it.