libvirt users - Jun 2010 - Dual-boot and also use raw disk in virtual machine

I've got a new computer with two SATA disks.
I installed a minimal Fedora 13 64-bit on the first disk.
I shut down the computer, unplugged the first disk,
booted up and installed Windows 7 on the second disk.
Then I shut down, and plugged the first disk back in.
I added a grub option to boot Windows from the second disk.
All fine so far - I had a working dual boot system.

Then in F13 using virt-manager I created a virtual machine using the second
disk as a raw disk.  Well, the only option I had (using
virt-manager, at least) was to configure it as an IDE disk.
Booting this virtual machine gets as far as "Starting Windows",
and the animation appears (a dot or two), and then BSOD.
Running the Windows diagnosis didn't help.

I gave up.  Then, keeping the same virtual machine configuration,
I installed Windows 7 again into the virtual machine.
I shut down the computer and booted from the second disk.
Saw "Starting Windows", and the animation got a bit further,
but got a BSOD again.

Now running sfdisk -l /dev/sdb in the F13 host shows:

Disk /dev/sdb: 121601 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *      0+     12-     13-    102400    7  HPFS/NTFS
                start: (c,h,s) expected (0,32,33) found (2,0,33)
                end: (c,h,s) expected (12,223,19) found (205,3,19)
/dev/sdb2         12+ 121601- 121589- 976657408    7  HPFS/NTFS
                start: (c,h,s) expected (12,223,20) found (205,3,20)
                end: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,15,63)
/dev/sdb3          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/sdb4          0       -       0          0    0  Empty

So there is some obvious disagreement about the
partition table.

Am I going to be able to get this to work?

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.

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

For example:

   Native boot
   ***********

   Real motherboard chip set (ie drivers for Intel, or AMD, or nVidia,
                              or something else)
   Real CPU (ie Intel or AMD)
   Real hard drives for storage (perhaps Intel, or nVidia drivers)
   Real network card(s) (ie drivers for Intel, or Broadcom, or Realtek,
                         etc)
   Real graphics cards (ie graphics drivers for nVidia, or ATI, or Intel,
                        etc)
   <and more>


   Virtualised (KVM) boot
   **********************

   Virtual motherboard chip set (software)
   Virtual CPU (partially a pass through of your real one)
   Virtual hard drive storage (KVM provided emulation layer)
   Virtual graphics cards (KVM provided emulation layer)
   <and more>

I'm not going to say it's 100% impossible, but it's definitely
likely
going to confuse the heck out of windows, when it tries to boot up using 
(for example) an nVidia or Intel chipset and they're not there.

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.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

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