On Sun, 15 Sep 2019, 17:36 Henry Cheng, <hbc2048@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I'm having trouble getting a vm going. (This is my first time ever. I believe I have kvm/qemu + virt-manager tools installed correctly.) Welcome to the list, and welcome to virt-install's "interesting" differences in parameter parsing depending on which parameter you use! You're already very close to a working solution. > ERROR Validating install media '/home/bill/win10.iso,bus=ide' failed: Must specify storage creation parameters for non-existent path '/home/bill/win10.iso,bus=ide'. > I'm not sure what " non-existent path " means below because i know that file exists at that path. ... tells you that there's not a file at the path '/home/bill/win10.iso,bus=ide'. There probably isn't, though I suspect there's one at '/home/bill/win10.iso' ;-). virt-install is parsing everything after the = as a path, because --cdrom doesn't take key=value parameters (unlike --disk). Everything in the argument is assumed to be part of the path. So you could either use simply: --cdrom=/home/bill/win10.iso, or a --disk parameter that allows you to pass options... > --disk /home/bill/win10.iso,device=cdrom,bus=ide <<< this one gives: "An install method must be specified" ... which you did. This has worked, so you've moved on to a different problem: virt-install can't guess what to boot from (in this case, which of two cdrom devices), so is asking you to specify via --boot. I'm not sure how to specify this for two CDROM drives (I use floppy = CDROM for my Windows installs, see below). You *might* be able to specify --boot cdrom, or you might need to do more work, or it might depend on your virt-install version. Cheers, - Peter == ADDENDA == > (Also, I am doing this on a headless server so using the gui virt-manager isn't an option.) Assuming your headless server is a UNIX box of some kind, you can always install enough of X11 that you can run virt-manager with the display on a window on the machine from which you're remoting into the server. Talk to me off-list if you want more details; I routinely run virt-manager on our headless servers from my Windows desktop box. > This is what I a getting when I try to create the vm. > $ virt-install --name=win10 \ > > --disk path=/home/bill/win10.img,bus=virtio \ > > --cdrom=/home/bill/win10.iso,bus=ide \ > > --disk path=/home/bill/virtio-win-0.1.172.iso,device=cdrom,bus=ide \ OK, you're going for the dual-CDROM approach to adding the Windows drivers. I've not tried that, so can't comment on how well it works. I still use the floppy image and a single CDROM image (and a SATA rather than IDE bus, though that shouldn't make a difference): --disk=device=floppy,path=/path/to/floppy.img \ --disk=device=cdrom,bus=sata,perms=ro,path=/path/to/image.iso \ Just as a side note, I suspect you'll eventually want to add ",model=virtio" to your network line, so that you use the (fast) virtio driver there as well, rather than whatever default virt-install gives you for Windows 10. _______________________________________________ virt-tools-list mailing list virt-tools-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/virt-tools-list