Samuel,
On 2016-10-02 11:54, users-request@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
From: Samuel Sieb samuel@sieb.net Subject: Re: RH Linux 5.2, Kernel 2.0.36, SCSI Disks => VM? + Nostalgia . . To: Community support for Fedora users users@lists.fedoraproject.org Message-ID: 71798836-ed8e-75ef-54d1-125d478f6ea4@sieb.net Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
On 09/30/2016 02:40 AM, Philip Rhoades wrote:
It was a little strange but pleasant looking at all this very old stuff
- knowing with hindsight how the users, lists and sites developed
after their modest beginnings. I guess I got a bit nostalgic and decided to continue to keep the box (it is the only old box I have that can accommodate the old Adaptec ISA board) but it occurred to me that it would be an interesting exercise to try and virtualise the system - is this possible? - could I create an image from the old 2GB SCSI boot disk and run it as a virtual machine somehow?
Shouldn't be a problem. The only issue would be whether the installed OS has a driver for the emulated scsi drive.
Do you mean if the host OS has a driver ie F25?
If you used the emulated IDE instead, you would need to mount the image (or drive) locally and edit the fstab to change the /dev/sd* entries to /dev/hd*.
Not sure why I would need to be emulating IDE . .
I expect the bootloader would be LILO
Correct.
which I think uses BIOS calls to load the OS, so that should work.
OK, I am still at a loss as to how to proceed . . I had assumed that I would need to do a dd of the old SCSI drive with it's 6 partitions and create an image that I could move to my F25 workstation and from there work out how to load into virt-manager or something . .
Thanks,
Phil.
On Tue, 04 Oct 2016 21:49:55 +1100 Philip Rhoades wrote:
work out how to load into virt-manager or something
If you DD the whole disk to a file, then that file will be in the correct format for a "raw" disk image.
If you then go into virt-manager and create a new VM and select the "use existing disk image option" that comes up in there somewhere, it might work.
The tricky bit is most likely to be selecting a disk driver for the VM to emulate which the OS in the image knows how to talk to.
On 10/04/2016 03:49 AM, Philip Rhoades wrote:
On 2016-10-02 11:54, users-request@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
From: Samuel Sieb samuel@sieb.net Shouldn't be a problem. The only issue would be whether the installed OS has a driver for the emulated scsi drive.
Do you mean if the host OS has a driver ie F25?
No, the RH 5.2 OS. See below.
If you used the emulated IDE instead, you would need to mount the image (or drive) locally and edit the fstab to change the /dev/sd* entries to /dev/hd*.
Not sure why I would need to be emulating IDE . .
In case the emulated SCSI chipset isn't supported by the installed OS. See below.
OK, I am still at a loss as to how to proceed . . I had assumed that I would need to do a dd of the old SCSI drive with it's 6 partitions and create an image that I could move to my F25 workstation and from there work out how to load into virt-manager or something . .
Tom explained briefly, but I'll add some more details.
Yes, you should dd the entire drive to a file in /var/lib/libvirt/images/. Then in virt-manager, create a new VM using the "Import existing disk image" option and choose the file that you copied the drive to. When you get to step 4, check the customize button. In the list of VM parts, there will most likely be an "IDE Disk 1" or something similar. Click on it and open the advanced options section. With a recent Linux version, you would ideally use the virtio disk bus, but there wouldn't be support for that in RH5.2. The way it works is that the VM provides a virtual disk controller for the OS to use. But the OS has to have a driver for whichever chipset is being emulated. Virtio skips all that by providing direct access to the hypervisor and skipping all the emulation slowdown. I thought there were different chipset emulations you could choose, but it looks like from virt-manager, it only provides one for each bus type. Try the SCSI bus and hopefully it will be supported. It likely will be as the emulated devices tend to be commonly used chipsets.
Hopefully this helps you.
-
Philip Rhoades -
Samuel Sieb -
Tom Horsley