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

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Thu Jan 5 10:05:44 UTC 2012


On Thu, Jan 05, 2012 at 10:27:29AM +0200, Dor Laor wrote:
> 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?

Xen used to synthesize an MBR in the guest.

As Ian asked above, it's possible to do this with device-mapper too,
although I doubt it's a good idea, but here's how you'd do it anyway:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/virt/2010-September/002288.html
https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/technique-for-synthesizing-a-partition-table-on-a-naked-filesystem/

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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