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

[Bill Burns]

On 09/22/2011 08:03 AM, David C. Mores wrote:
> 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.  

Exactly the opposite, if you ask me. You change a piece of
hardware and Windows thinks someone is running a bootleg
version and you have to re-register, etc.

 Bill

> 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
>
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