[fedora-virt] qemu-kvm to guest using physical Windows7 partition (on Fedora16)

[Emanuel Rietveld]

On 12/31/2011 05:35 PM, Philip Rhoades wrote:
> People,
>
> I have found some threads (here and elsewhere) about doing this but 
> they all seem to come back to the same problem - that the virtual 
> guest treats the hard disk partition differently from how real Windows 
> treats the partition - so it makes it difficult to be able to both 
> dual-boot the Windows partition and also use the Windows partition in 
> a Windows guest setup on Fedora.  Has anyone worked out how to do this 
> conveniently?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Phil.

When you give qemu-kvm a partition to use as disk for a guest, it does 
exactly that. It uses the partition as a disk for the guest. So, the 
guest sees a *disk* while in the physical situation it's a *partition*. 
You may be able to do what you want by attaching a whole disk to the 
guest, instead of just the partition.

Caveat 1: I would strongly recommend to use a second, separate physical 
disk for your windows boot, instead of running your host and the guest 
from the same physical disk. If multiple operating systems are writing 
to the same area of the disk at the same time, you can get nasty data 
corruption, which is one reason you usually attach only a designated 
partition to the guest, instead of a whole disk.

Caveat 2: You of course already know this, but Windows is not designed 
to be run in this configuration (same installation runs physical as well 
as virtual), so you may run into unexpected issues, even if you get it 
to work.

Emanuel