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

[David C. Mores]

Alex Williamson wrote:
> 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
>
>
I thought that to be one of Window's strengths - to
"just work" in many hardware environments.  Can you point me to any 
information or discussion resources where I could find discussion and 
more details on how others have done this?

Thanks,
Dave