Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 08:03:11AM -0400, David C. Mores wrote: >> Alex Williamson wrote: >>> On Wed, 2011-09-21 at 15:02 -0400, David C. Mores wrote: >>>> I have a new HP PC with AMD quad CPU that came with Win7 installed. I >>>> installed Fedora 15 by first shrinking the hard drive ntfs partition in >>>> half and letting the Fedora installation set up the dual boot >>>> configuration in the GRUB boot menu. That all works fine. I can boot >>>> either O/S with no problems or side effects. >>>> >>>> Now to take this to the next level, I would like to setup a Win7 VM >>>> under Fedora that uses the Win7 installation that is already available >>>> in the Win 7 partition. Running the original Win 7 installation as a VM >>>> guest would be cool - efficient use of storage, the Win7 license and >>>> convenient - along with the existing option to reboot into Win 7. The >>>> Fedora Virtualization Guide documentation does not seem to cover this >>>> case where the O/S install exists before the VM is created. >>>> >>>> Can this be done? Have you done it successfully? What are the details? >>> This is not as easy as you'd like it to be. KVM presents the guest OS >>> with an entirely different chipset and IO devices from the physical >>> system. It's effectively the same as yanking out your hard drive and >>> installing it into an old pentium-pro class system and expecting Windows >>> to "just work". Some have done it, with much registery hacking, but >>> it's not easy and appears fragile. > In addition to this, Windows won't work on an unpartitioned disk. > There's a very hacky way to do it: > > https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/technique-for-synthesizing-a-partition-table-on-a-naked-filesystem/
So does this mean that the ntfs partition on the physical disk looks like a unpartitioned disk as presented by KVM to the guest OS? How would one hook up the Windows partition to the VM? >> I thought that to be one of Window's strengths - to >> "just work" in many hardware environments. Can you point me to any >> information or discussion resources where I could find discussion and >> more details on how others have done this? > Windows Product Activation will decide that you're trying to run > Windows on a different piece of hardware and will decide you're not in > compliance. (This is quite likely to be true.) You'll at least need > to reactivate Windows each time you switch from physical to virtual; > and maybe purchase another license. > > You might also need to change the Critical Device Database, HAL, and > other things to get it to boot. > > Rich. > Are you saying that this is what I should expect to encounter based on your experiences with running the physical install as a VM? Is KVM technology evolution headed toward making the KVM represent the actual physical hardware (chipset, IO devices, etc.)? Dave _______________________________________________ virt mailing list [email protected] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/virt
