On 2023-02-08 14:55, Wilson Birney wrote:
I have a windows NT 4.0 raw image that when converted with qemu-img to
qcow2 or vmdk fails to boot in qemu with no obvious error using the
following:
qemu-system-i386 -m 128 -cpu pentium -hda f.qcow2
It just hangs at 'Booting from Hard Disk...." and pegs out a cpu core.
This same image boots just fine in vmware Workstation and virtualbox
when i convert to a vmdk.
Any ideas on what could be causing this or what to do to diagnose it?
Check the virtual hard disk interface. The NT 4.0 boot process relies
on some files
in the root directory providing details of that hardware, for example
the driver for
virtio-scsi or vmware-scsi. Or an indication to use standard IDE/SATA
drivers. This
also includes which partition contains Windows. Some of this is in the
text file
BOOT.INI, other parts are in code files in the root, such as a .SYS file
for the SCSI
driver.
As a result, any virtual disk for running NT 4.0 under virtualization
will be specific to
the disk, display and CPU hardware of that VM configuration.
Fortunately however, there are qemu utilities to mount the virtual disk
under the host
OS, where an appropriate file system driver can access the FAT, NTFS or
HPFS contents
for r/w and thus potentially change of this hardware information. To
access registry
settings it is more practical to mount the disk as a secondary disk in a
VM that boots
from a minimalist Windows system such as WinPE, from which the secondary
disk
registry files can be mounted elsewhere in the registry tree for editing.
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