Re: Using qemu-img to directly convert physical disk to KVM image

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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
>
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