[fedora-virt] Dual boot Fedora15/Win7 with VM Win7 too

[Alex Williamson]

On Wed, 2011-09-21 at 15:02 -0400, David C. Mores wrote:
> I have a new HP PC with AMD quad CPU that came with Win7 installed.  I 
> installed Fedora 15 by first shrinking the hard drive ntfs partition in 
> half and letting the Fedora installation set up the dual boot 
> configuration in the GRUB boot menu.  That all works fine.  I can boot 
> either O/S with no problems or side effects.
> 
> Now to take this to the next level, I would like to setup a Win7 VM 
> under Fedora that uses the Win7 installation that is already available 
> in the Win 7 partition.  Running the original Win 7 installation as a VM 
> guest would be cool - efficient use of storage, the Win7 license and 
> convenient - along with the existing option to reboot into Win 7.  The 
> Fedora Virtualization Guide documentation does not seem to cover this 
> case where the O/S install exists before the VM is created.
> 
> Can this be done?  Have you done it successfully?  What are the details?

This is not as easy as you'd like it to be.  KVM presents the guest OS
with an entirely different chipset and IO devices from the physical
system.  It's effectively the same as yanking out your hard drive and
installing it into an old pentium-pro class system and expecting Windows
to "just work".  Some have done it, with much registery hacking, but
it's not easy and appears fragile.

Alex