[fedora-virt] qemu-kvm to guest using physical Windows7 partition (on Fedora16)

[Philip Rhoades]

Rich,


On 2012-01-05 21:05, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 05, 2012 at 10:27:29AM +0200, Dor Laor wrote:
>> On 01/03/2012 06:42 PM, Ian Pilcher wrote:
>> >On 01/02/2012 03:38 AM, Emanuel Rietveld wrote:
>> >>When you give qemu-kvm a partition to use as disk for a guest, it 
>> does
>> >>exactly that. It uses the partition as a disk for the guest. So, 
>> the
>> >>guest sees a *disk* while in the physical situation it's a 
>> *partition*.
>> >>You may be able to do what you want by attaching a whole disk to 
>> the
>> >>guest, instead of just the partition.


Not possible in my situation - I want to be able to dual boot OR run 
Windows 7 as a guest using the same partition install.


>> >I've often thought that it should be possible to cook something up 
>> with
>> >device manager -- essentially creating a "wrapper" that provides a 
>> MBR,
>> >etc. around a Windows logical volume or partition.  Might be a fun
>> >project for someone.
>>
>> I'm sure its possible to do that but it may require some hack of
>> presenting a the original MBR as some type of shadow one for the
>> guest or other trick. Ric, have you played w/ it?
>
> Xen used to synthesize an MBR in the guest.
>
> As Ian asked above, it's possible to do this with device-mapper too,
> although I doubt it's a good idea, but here's how you'd do it anyway:
>
> 
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/virt/2010-September/002288.html
> 
> https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/technique-for-synthesizing-a-partition-table-on-a-naked-filesystem/


So if I understand this correctly - it IS possible to (easily) do what 
I want with Xen but NOT kvm?

Thanks,

Phil.
-- 
Philip Rhoades

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E-mail:  phil at pricom.com.au