Re: using a Windows 7 disk image with KVM?

["Alexander V. Makartsev" <avbetev@gmail.com>]

On 20.09.2018 10:08, Gary Dale wrote:

Is this even possible? I can create a KVM guest from a Windows 7 install DVD iso and it works fine. However I have a Windows 7 disk image that I want to virtualize that I can't get to go beyond "Booting from Hard Disk..."

Windows 7 running in KVM also doesn't seem to like being repaired. If I connect to the DVD install iso, it complains about the disk being the wrong version of Windows. I believe this is because it wants a UEFI-booted DVD to repair a Windows 7 disk installation.

I'm running this on Debian/Stretch AMD64.

I've seen posts from people doing this with Virtual Box but I'd rather stick with KVM if possible.

There don't seem to be a lot of online advice about doing this with KVM compared to VirtualBox or VMware. The advice on the other systems is also contradictory or old. Sometimes it says to use just the Windows partition while other documents say to use the whole disk (in my case, there is an EFI partition, another partition and then the actual Windows partion). losetup gives me the 3 partitions as block devices, so I could extract just the Windows partition if needed...

Has anyone got this to work?

It looks like booting process can't get past bootloader. It doesn't even start to boot Win7 itself.

May I ask, how did you created Win7 disk image? Is it raw byte-to-byte copy? What software did you used to create said image?

If Win7 repair complains about DVD .iso it probably is different, because there are multiple versions of channels Windows is distributed through and every channel has different version.

Depending on source of your disk image I'd try to restore windows bootloader (bcdboot) inside disk image and see if that helps. You can do it from installation media without proceeding with repair procedure. Press Shift-F10 to invoke CMD and from there you can check if your disk image is ok, all partitions are intact (via diskpart.exe) and restore bootloader inside mounted Windows' boot partition (via bcdboot.exe).

-- 
With kindest regards, Alexander.

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