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

[David C. Mores]

Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> 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/

So does this mean that the ntfs partition on the physical disk looks 
like a unpartitioned disk as presented by KVM to the guest OS?
How would one hook up the Windows partition to the VM?
>> 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.
>

Are you saying that this is what I should expect to encounter based on 
your experiences with running the physical install as a VM?

Is KVM technology evolution headed toward making the KVM represent the 
actual physical hardware (chipset, IO devices, etc.)?

Dave