Just a bit more info from my unfortunate experience. I took about 20 hours to get the original WinXP machine virtualized including an unfortunate bug?lock condition? That required a re-install after I spent time doing an image. Also initially I made the mistake of making an image of every partition instead of cloning the entire physical drive. So that obviously didn't work. When I realized my mistake, I thought since it was possible to attach a physical drive to a guest, maybe I could run the guest directly off the physical drive (the original was a fakeraid 1 so I had a backup copy in any case). But for some reason it didn't work. That was about the time I asked about the direct method. But the resulting qcow2 didn't work in the end, I thought it did and happily post my last update. However, the OS never managed to complete booting, for some reason the guest took up 25% load and stay stuck. I was running out of time, so apologies to the KVM folks, I took the easy way out again (Xen didn't work for me either a yr ago). Downloaded VM Player, qemu-img to a vmdk and although there was an error message about invalid boot.ini, the XP guest works. Despite the possibility of losing yet another day, I'll still give KVM a try the next time I have to virtualize a machine. On 11/9/10, Michael Tokarev <mjt@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 09.11.2010 05:54, Emmanuel Noobadmin wrote: >> Thanks for the confirmation and just for the benefit of anybody else >> who subsequently searches for <keywords> KVM QEMU convert physical >> drive virtual machine image </keywords>, yes it works :) > > Heh. Well, it is not something unexpected really. Just a few more > comments below... > >> On 11/9/10, Michael Tokarev <mjt@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> 09.11.2010 01:48, Emmanuel Noobadmin wrote: >>>> I'm trying to convert a physical Windows XP machine into a KVM guest. >>>> All the guides so far mentions using dd to create a flat image file, >>>> then using qemu-img to convert that to qcow2. Since I've been making >>>> mistake here and there, retrying the process several times (initially >>>> converting each logical partition into an image), the question struck >>>> me: is there any reason why I cannot do something like this >>>> qemu-img convert -f /dev/sdc -O qcow2 /images/winxp.qcow instead of >>>> having to do it in two passes which literally take hours each. > > You mentioned several kinds of storage. The format of (virtual) drive > can be raw or qcow2, or others supported by qemu. The location of the > data can be in a file on a filesystem, or it can be a physical device > (/dev/sdc), or a lvm volume, or a partition, or an iscsi lun, or any > other block device. Either reasonable combination of the two can be > used. > > In this case, running your guest off /dev/sda directly will work too. > Moreover, you most likely does not want to convert it to a qcow2 format, > due to various small and large issues with it - the "flat image file" > created with dd, or a raw format created by `qemu-img -O raw' (which > is almost the same but with zero blocks skipped) will most likely work > better (read: faster and more reliable). > > /mjt > -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
