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

[Ademar de Souza Reis Jr.]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2012 at 10:07:31AM -0700, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 01/05/2012 08:11 AM, Philip Rhoades wrote:
> > Rich,
> > 
> > 
> > On 2012-01-05 21:05, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> >> 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.
> > 
> > 
> > Not possible in my situation - I want to be able to dual boot OR run
> > Windows 7 as a guest using the same partition install.
> 
> Won't work, in general, because your virtual machine will present
> different hardware to Windows than the native dual boot, and Windows is
> super-finicky about being booted on the same hardware every time.

Win7 is (relativelly) smart. It worked perfectly here a while ago using
VirtualBox - and I have fancy hardware (it's a gaming machine).
But you have to reactivate your windows everytime you switch,
which is a PITA.

> > 
> > 
> > So if I understand this correctly - it IS possible to (easily) do what I
> > want with Xen but NOT kvm?
> 
> No.  It's not possible to do what you want with either solution (at
> least, not possible while still being above the law with Microsoft
> product activation).

I fail to see why it's ilegal (you are alowed to switch your
machine keeping your win7 installation, you just can't have
multiple installations). IANAL, though.

Cheers,
   - Ademar

-- 
Ademar de Souza Reis Jr.
Red Hat

^[:wq!