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Re: using a Windows 7 disk image with KVM?



On 2018-09-21 12:53 AM, Chris wrote:
On Fri, 21 Sep 2018 00:13:28 -0400
Gary Dale wrote:

I'm pleased to report that with the firmware change, the new image
booted fine first try! Now I just need to do a little tuning.
Which tool did you use to create the disk image? Was it a physical
machine before?

Did you have to "repair" the windows installation before booting in KVM?

Chris

I used dd after booting the physical Windows machine using systemrescuecd. I mounted a share on the hypervisor machine then did "dd if=/dev/sda of=<mountpoint>/<filename>.raw

When that finished, I ssh'd to the hypervisor and moved the raw file to my (unshared) folder of virtual machines.

Finally from my office workstation, I connected to the hypervisor and created the new VM from the existing disk image using the UEFI boot firmware.

And that was it, almost. I did have to do a little trickery to get it do switch to virtio drivers from IDE. It's a chicken & egg situation - you need a device that uses the virtio driver before you can install it in Windows, so I attached another disk image to use virtio while my original still used IDE. After browsing to the correct folder on the virtio CD image, I installed the virtio driver then shut down the VM. Then I set the boot drive to use virtio and disconnected the other disk image. This way Windows has the virtio driver it needs for the boot disk.

You might be able to do this using the repair tools as well but this seemed easier. Of course, there is no requirement to use virtio drivers, but the speed increase is noticeable.


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