Trying to install a Windows 8.1 guest under KVM

[Chris Murphy]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2015 at 12:20 PM, Thomas Cameron
<thomas.cameron at camerontech.com> wrote:
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> I am trying to install a Windows 8.1 guest using KVM. I'd like to use
> virtio for network and disk, but I can't seem to find virtio drivers
> that windows 8.1 actually recognizes. Under RHEL 7, it would be the
> virtio-win package. No such package seems to exist for F21.
>
> I downloaded the iso from
> http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/ and
> made it available to the win8.1 installer as an IDE CD, it sees them.

That's all I'm finding. Searching libvirt user and devel lists also is
unrevealing.

This is surprisingly more difficult than I'd expect, I guess most
people just go for dual-boot I guess. But I'd rather have Fedora take
exclusive use of the small SSD in this laptop so that the bloated
space inefficient Windows installation (seriously it's 6 partitions
with about 10+GB of wasted space) by using qcow2 or LVM thinp volumes.
The laptop doesn't come with install media, but through obscure
searching found I needed to download an application from Dell to
create recovery media. The resulting media is UEFI boot only, so at
the moment I'm at this stage:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Using_UEFI_with_QEMU
And I'm even wondering if the recovery media I have will even install,
because my understanding is that it looks at something in the firmware
to get its license activated, there is no serial number anywhere.

> But when I tell win8.1 to use them, it says "did not find any drivers"
> and it still can't see the virtio disk.
>
> What am I doing wrong?
>
> I'll gladly RTFM, but I've looked through the F21 installation and
> system administrator's guide at http://docs.fedoraproject.org/ and I
> don't see a word about virtualization. If anyone can point me to the
> right FM to R, I'll go!

Yeah I'm a few critical steps behind you, hopefully I end up in the
same spot sooner than later. The only thin I'm thinking of, having no
functioning UI in front of me, is that maybe you add a virtio device
with a blank qcow2 file backing it, boot Windows guest, and then
right-click on Computer, Manage (something or other) and get the list
of hardware and maybe it'll show you that virtio device as an unknown
thing. You can click on that, get properties and there's a way to
install or update drivers, at which point maybe it'll accept the
drivers you've mounted from the ISO file you downloaded.

It is definitely worth using virtio.

-- 
Chris Murphy