I finally decided to update my old VB2.3 server. It was on an old X86 laptop so couldn't run VB2.4 and Fedora 20 updates on VB2.3 stopped working ages ago. And Spotty won't work on that version of LMS either...Anyhow, long overdue.

My bright idea was use my more recently retired (2019) i3 laptop of 2012 vintage as it has 6GB RAM and (gasp) a built in DVD drive for ripping. I have a long established 2TB drive as storage (and a second as plugin backup). The laptop battery died a few years ago, it was a bugger to replace (yes, pop out battteries went out of fashion that long ago...) and then the new battery died, just out of its one year warranty. And it was Windows 7. New laptop time c.2019.

So I thought, retire it gracefully and use it for two purposes. Dual boot VB2.4 server (just VB running most of it's planned time) and Windows 10 with a few Office-y type programs incase my daily driver laptop goes south at any point. In order to keep the Vortexbox usage seamless I planned to install VB2.5 OVF as a virtual machine when Windows is being used.

This sounded like a mini project not a major one....

Problem 1 is that VB2.4 (once you fire it up from the USB installation media) immediately cleans the whole internal SATA hard drive - partitions and all - and converts it to GPT (from MBR). So I think I'm going to have to install it on a USB hard drive. There don't appear to be any options for this in the ISO, so I guess do the VB2.4 clean install and clone the created partitions to a USB HDD temporarily using DiskGenius.

I'll then clean-install Windows onto the internal HDD. Once I get UEFI Windows to install I can clone the off-board VB partitions back to the internal HDD and get dual-boot going. And clone the Windows partition to the USB HDD so I can restore the whole machine relatively easily in future.

Problem 2 is that I planned to use Windows Pro's Hyper-V as the Virtual Machine host. Unfortunately the supplied VB versions (OVF and VHDX) don't play with Hyper-V so I have had to convert the file with StarWind V2V converter. Before I go ahead with Hyper-V, which I thought would be the one that plays nicely with Windows, are there any thoughts on whether to run VMWare or something as the VM host instead?
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TIA

Edit
TL DR
1. How do you get VB2.4 to install to a different drive to the internal HDD?

2. Best option for running VB2.5 as a VM from within Windows 10 Pro