Can the bios grub partition or the boot partition of a virtual machine drive be damaged if it is used as a regular system boot drive.
I created a Manjaro QEMU KVM virt manager installation by installing to a dedicated SSD (as opposed to VM image file) and manually created partitions as if were a bare metal installation.
The GRUB menu for the host system now appears following an update and I can now use the GRUB menu to dual boot by selecting either the host system or the VM as the second entry.
Is this ability normal and does booting from the VM drive as a boot system drive at computer startup cause potential corruption or damage to the VM drive bios grub or boot partitions?
I have been running VMs this way for many years. Not sure what you mean by damaged, everything on the drive, as far as Grub is concerned is the same. Bare metal, qcow2 file, or the PCIe decive (SSD) itself; doesn’t matter.
All you need is the (default 300MB) FAT32 EFI partition in /boot/efi like normal. Virt-manager may do this for you now, but I had to install another package to get the OVMF file, which is the boot loader for UEFI. Then add that to the XML manually. (sudo virsh edit example)
To prevent this behavior of GRUB, you can either deactivate the os-prober or add the partition of the VM to the os-prober skiplist.
GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true
GRUB_OS_PROBER_SKIP_LIST="<UUID>@/dev/<partition e.g. sdc3>"
That never hurts. My VMs, for the most part, only see one boot disk, so I tend to forget about it.