After much gnashing and wailing of teeth, I finally found that xen will boot from a hard disk partition, this is good news I want to be able to use my existing XP install without rebooting. But after all the setup and the heartache I cannot get the install to boot. The domain sets up fine but whe I VNC into it says ata0 master: QEMU Hard disk ata-7 (17000 MB)....

followed by the line "booting from hard disk", and it just sits there doing nothing the only thing i noticed is that this is a 80 some-odd GB HD and the hard disk identifier lables it as 17GB. I tried changing the device info to use the recovery partition, and that at least got me further, it was an endless loop of I/O error, press any key to reboot, booting from harddisk.

I am running a HP dv9000z with 2GB RAM, dual sata 100GB 7200rpm hard drives, dual core Turion X2 TL-56 (1.8ghz per core).

The Hard drives are configured as such sda has 3 partitions sda1 -- windows xp mediacenter, sda2 -- recovery partition, sda3 -- Proprietary HP QuikPlay 300MB boot partition in sdb1, the bulk of the hard drive as root in sdb2, and 1.5GB swap in sdb3.

GRUB is loaded in the MBR of sda and works fine when booting the computer, I also tried booting xen into sda, but grub ends with an error21.

my xen domain config for xp is as such:

kernel="/usr/lib/xen-3.0.3-1/boot/hvmloader"
builder="hvm"
memory=512
name="winxp"
vcpus=1
vif=['type=ioemu,bridge=xenbr0']
disk=['phy:/dev/sda1,ioemu:hda,w']
device_model='/usr/lib/xen-3.0.3-1/bin/qemu-dm'
cdrom ='/dev/cdrom'
vnc=1
vncviewer=1
ne2000=0
boot="c"

I don't know whats doing this, does anyone have any ideas where I should go from here?

Thanks,
Alex

After searching and re-searching the net I found someone with a similar problem, the solution was to upgrade to xen 3.0.4 whic uses the 2.6.16 series kernel, that won't do, because due to my HW I need a 2.6.18 kernel, which turns out is ok because xen has released 3.1 stable which uses the 2.6.18 kernel. But even that is giving me headaches now, but that will be another request for help on a another thread when i have time.

Dear Folks,

very interesting things you did - thanks for the good job. Well I have a similar Problem:

have sles using xen 3.x (all working fine)
have also winxp installation of an user

What I want: I want to get this winxp_installation (that was done on different hardware) running under xen

What I did: made iso out of the winxp partition (dd if ... of...) and tried to make new VM with xen tools > but either xen gui broke when adding the harddisk (the iso file of the winxp partition) or the graphic interface of the VM showed "booting from hard disk ..." and then did not response any more while doing nothing with 10%CPU load.

Is there anyone who could please help me with an idea of what is my problem? would be very nice - thanks in advance!


Another idea would be using existing xen VM-xp_installation and copy the windows files into it to have the initial full-installed version... but howto mount the image files?! idea with losetup or kpartx resulted in no mounting device... Any productive solution would be very interesting for all of us ...

Best regards gerfry

Try creating a VM with a HD the same size as the original XP machine, then boot to the VM and mount the disk image and do dd to the virtual HD.

when I attempt to run the windows xp vm the console shows "booting from hard disk...", the cpu usage goes to 100%, and that's as far as it gets.

I have a dual-boot setup that I'm attempting to convert to a dual-boot plus xen setup. I'm running openSuSE 11.2 with the 2.6.31.5-0.1-xen kernel and Xen 3.4.1. the hard drive is partitioned as:
sda1 - xp (ntfs)
sda2 - extended partition
sda5 - /windows/D (fat32)
sda6 - swap
sda7 - / (ext4)
sda8 - /home (ext4)
(I have a second hard drive, sdb, but it is not currently in use. It will eventually be a mirror image of sda.)

I've configured the windows xp vm as:
name="windowsxp"
uuid="b3a2c424-7df7-94f6-79a8-c641e412f68d"
memory=512
maxmem=512
vcpus=2
on_poweroff="destroy"
on_reboot="restart"
on_crash="destroy"
localtime=1
keymap="en-us"

builder="hvm"
extid=0
device_model="/usr/lib/xen/bin/qemu-dm"
kernel="/usr/lib/xen/boot/hvmloader"
boot="c"
disk=[ 'phy:/dev/sda1,hda1,w', ]
vif=[ 'bridge=br0,model=rtl8139', ]


stdvga=0
vnc=1
vncunused=1
apic=1
acpi=1
pae=1

usb=1
usbdevice='tablet'

serial="pty"

(I've tried multiple different "disk=..." combinations, this is just the latest, but I get the same results from all of them.)

how do I fix this? (it would seem that however xen tries to boot windows xp, it's not as effective as grub's chainloader.)