[fedora-virt] how to boot Windows partition as KVM/Qemu guest

[Henning Rohde]

Sorry for not answering any earlier - one need's just a bit of magic on 
sfdisk and dmsetup:

> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/zero count=63
> # losetup -fv /tmp/zero
> # echo -e "unit: sectors\n\n/dev/sda1 : start= 63, size= $( blockdev --getsz /dev/sda1 ), Id=7" | sfdisk --force /dev/loop0
> # echo -e "0 63 linear /dev/loop0 0\n63 $( blockdev --getsz /dev/sda1 ) linear /dev/sda1 0" | dmsetup -v create virtdisk
> # fdisk -lu /dev/mapper/virtdisk

On my tests I could at least fsck the partition - YMMV!

	Henning


Am 28.09.2010 18:27, schrieb sam chan:
>
>
>
> so looks like this functionality is just more involved
> and complex than i realized.  probably not worth the
> effort, at this point, to try to hack my way through
> it.
>
> moving forward, would this be something that's worth
> adding as an explicit feature to KVM?
>
>
>
> -sam
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, 28 Sep 2010, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 12:11:45PM +0100, Daniel Sanabria wrote:
>>> I know you can use vmware converter (i'm done this myself in the past) it
>>> will allow you to convert  local and remote physical machines into virtual
>>> machines most likely in vkdm format that you can then run from kvm.
>>>
>>> Not sure if libguestfs or any other open source tool allows you to do this,
>>> but I'd certainly love to see an open source alternative to this approach.
>>
>> You would need virt-p2v, but that doesn't solve the problem since it
>> makes a copy of the Windows disk, and the requester wants to run the
>> original in place.
>>
>> As Dor pointed out, this is more complex than it looks.  If you just
>> configure the guest to have for example:
>>
>> <disk type='block'>
>>   <source dev='/dev/sda1'/>
>>   <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>
>> </disk>
>>
>> then virtual Windows will see a block device containing the filesystem
>> (no partition table).  It's unlikely that Windows will even boot.
>>
>> Another way to do it is very hairy, but might just work:
>>
>> <disk type='block'>
>>   <source dev='/dev/sda'/>
>>   <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>
>> </disk>
>>
>> Of course now virtual Windows will see the host disk, so you'd need to
>> be extremely careful not to modify the partition table or the Linux
>> host partition from the guest (not to mention security concerns).
>>
>> Rich.
>>
>> --
>> Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
>> virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines.  Tiny program with many
>> powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
>> http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top
>> _______________________________________________
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>> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/virt
>>
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-- 

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i.A. Henning Rohde

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