On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 06:54:48PM +0000, Boylan, Ross wrote: > I have a couple of SATA disks (software RAID on some partitions) with a system that has become unreliable on them. I plan to add more disks and install a new system on them (Debian wheezy). I will still need to run things on the old OS (simultaneously running the new OS) to migrate. > > Is there a way I can use the 2 old physical disks in a VM? How? > > Searching suggests that I can't simply say -hda /dev/sdc. There are some references to using virtio, but it isn't clear to me if this would enable me to use the physical disk as is. In some cases you can simply point QEMU at /dev/sdc and it will boot without a hitch. However, it depends on the guest operating system. Windows is fussy about hardware changes and may refuse to boot. Modern Linux distros tend to be okay. Booting from a pre-existing physical disk works best when the hardware changes that the guest sees are minimal. Even in a Linux guest there could be a problem if /etc/fstab uses device names like /dev/sda instead of disk labels because the device name could change if the hardware changes (e.g. virtio disks are named /dev/vda). If you are familiar with moving disks between physical machines or rescuing broken systems that don't boot, then booting a pre-existing physical disk inside KVM should feel familiar. You may also want to look at p2v migration tools: http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v/ Good luck! Stefan
Attachment:
pgp1Ab4Pc5lbF.pgp
Description: PGP signature
