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

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Thu Sep 22 14:37:12 UTC 2011


On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 08:03:11AM -0400, 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.

In addition to this, Windows won't work on an unpartitioned disk.
There's a very hacky way to do it:

https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/technique-for-synthesizing-a-partition-table-on-a-naked-filesystem/

> 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?

Windows Product Activation will decide that you're trying to run
Windows on a different piece of hardware and will decide you're not in
compliance.  (This is quite likely to be true.)  You'll at least need
to reactivate Windows each time you switch from physical to virtual;
and maybe purchase another license.

You might also need to change the Critical Device Database, HAL, and
other things to get it to boot.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any
software inside the virtual machine.  Supports Linux and Windows.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/


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