[virt-tools-list] virt-install "Validating install media failed"

[Peter Crowther]

On Sun, 15 Sep 2019, 17:36 Henry Cheng, <hbc2048 at gmail.com> 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.