Virtualize an existing installation of Windows

[John Summerfield]

Dylan Semler wrote:
> Using gparted, I've been able to sneak a Fedora partition on my work laptop
> and dual boot F8 and XP.  My next ambition is to be able to boot my XP
> partition as a virtual machine in Linux using Xen.  I've seen a how-to for
> vmware[1], but I feel that Xen performs better (especially with the VT-x
> extension) and I'd like to try that first.  Does anyone know if this is
> possible?
> 
> [1]http://mazimi.wordpress.com/2007/06/24/virtualization-of-an-existing-physical-partition-of-windows-within-linux/


I delayed responding, because although I've not done this yet, it's 
something I want to do.

I've now tried, and failed so far, using qemu-kvm.

I have (Intel) hardware virtualisation, so it should work.

I think that this should work:
qemu-kvm -boot c -snapshot -m 256 -smp 2 -std-vga /dev/sda
but I'm unwilling to actually do that, so I tried copying the first part 
of the disk to a file.

The process I followed and the manner of its failure are documented on 
the fedora-xen list.

I've not yet tried with xen; to do so requires I reboot.


-- 

Cheers
John

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