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

[Dor Laor]

On 01/03/2012 06:42 PM, Ian Pilcher wrote:
> On 01/02/2012 03:38 AM, Emanuel Rietveld wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I've often thought that it should be possible to cook something up with
> device manager -- essentially creating a "wrapper" that provides a MBR,
> etc. around a Windows logical volume or partition.  Might be a fun
> project for someone.

I'm sure its possible to do that but it may require some hack of 
presenting a the original MBR as some type of shadow one for the guest 
or other trick. Ric, have you played w/ it?

>
>> 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.
>
> The biggest issue I would expect would be constant requests to
> "reactivate" the Windows VM/system.

Right. Some versions of windows license (VLK) ignore that too.