What did you mean by tape a windows hard drive? All you need to do is make partitions and you can have windows and linux run side by side on the same drive. There is no need for something as complicated as a virtual machine. I ran dual boot machines like this for decades before I heard of virtual machines.
On Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 6:52 AM Sam Varshavchik <mrsam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Samuel Sieb writes:
> On 10/24/22 21:26, ToddAndMargo via users wrote:
>> On 10/24/22 21:09, Slade Watkins via users wrote:
>>> On 10/24/22 11:38 PM, ToddAndMargo via users wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Is there a way to tape a native Windows hard
>>>> drive and port it to qemu-kvm?
>>>
>>> Hm. Did a bit of digging... this is all I could find.
>>>
>>> https://manuel.kiessling.net/2013/03/19/converting-a-running-physical-
>>> machine-to-a-kvm-virtual-machine/
>>
>> Yikes!
>
> Yes, that's pretty crazy, but that's doing the conversion live without
> downtime and would have been somewhat easier with kpartx. But it also
> doesn't apply to Windows.
>
> I assume that you can shut the system down because otherwise I don't know
> how you would do it. The easiest way is just to make a raw disk image from
> the source hard drive and boot that. You can save a lot of space using a
> qcow image by using ntfsclone to copy the data since that only copies the
> used sectors. Windows will probably be somewhat unhappy about the hardware
> changing underneath, but should be able to get over that.
A forest must be missing here, hiding beyond all these trees. I haven't done
this myself but I'd be surprised if it's not possible to set up a qemu VM
that's pointing at an actual disk image, /dev/sdX, instead of an image file.
The real problem I see here is that the existing Windows install is likely
to be an OEM install license that's tied to the hardware, and will
automatically deactivate itself when it wakes up in a new machine. You'll
have to either deal with using deactivated Windows or pay for a retail
license.
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