Trying to install a Windows 8.1 guest under KVM

[Thomas Cameron]

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On 01/12/2015 05:28 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> 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.

I finally wound up just grabbing the virtio-win package from RHEL. It
works fine with F21.

Thomas

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