[libvirt-users] Dual-boot and also use raw disk in virtual machine

[Richard Walker]

On 1 June 2010 16:14, Justin Clift <justin at salasaga.org> wrote:
> On 06/01/2010 01:09 PM, Richard Walker wrote:
> <snip>
>>
>> Am I going to be able to get this to work?
>
> Hi Richard,
>
> Reading through the steps you took, my initial thought is that it sounds
> like a bad idea (sorry).
>
> It sounds like you want to have Windows 7 on the 2nd hard drive, and be able
> to boot it from either inside a virtual machine, or natively as a dual boot.

Exactly.

> To me, the major problem that presents is the different devices windows will
> see with each type of boot.

It wasn't a completely random idea to try this -- I had found some evidence
of people getting this to work successfully (albeit with XP):

http://un.codiert.org/2008/09/booting-windows-xp-from-raw-disk-with-linux-kvm/

(I did wonder whether the deletion of the Hardware Profiles function from
Windows 7 would have any effect.)

> Have you told windows not to automatically reboot at BSOD, so you can read
> what's causing the BSOD?  It may specifically list the cause (ie a specific
> driver?) on the BSOD screen, and you may be able to work around it.

I have now . . . good tip.  It seems I get one of the standard messages:
*** STOP: 0x0000007B (0xFFFFF880009A9928, ...)
which appears to indicate an inability to "find" the disk.

I will take a note of the drivers that are currently installed, then
do another fresh "native" install and try to add the extra drivers
manually.

Is there any significance to the apparently "broken" partition table
entries?  Probably yes . . . I will do some more investigation of
that too.