Qemu.img to hard drive
 

Has anyone done this?
That is, take a customized etch qemu image and transfered it to a fresh hard drive, mbr and all? Seems like it would save lots of post-install configuration.

Thanks.

"Has anyone done this? That is, take a customized etch qemu image and transfered it to a fresh hard drive, mbr and all? Seems like it would save lots of post-install configuration."

Whenever you transfer images from one disk to another you can run into problems with software that uses absolute hard drive addresses. Boot loaders typically use absolute hard drive addresses. So if the two hard drives have the exact same disk geometry then the new copy will probably work. If the two hard drives have different geometries then the new copy will probably have problems.

---------------
Steve Stites

I had trouble running a Qemu image made on one PC to run on a second. Imagine trying to run it on the actual hardware... In other words: I doubt it'll work, but I do understand your line of thought.

I've done it, not with Qemu, with bootitng. I also transferred an image of Windows XP Pro onto another computer with different size processor, different memory, different hard drive, different mac address on the network card. Allot of the components were the same, but two different models of HP computers, had to re-activate it also, but it worked.
I have a bootitng compressed image of all 6 OS's in my main box that can be installed on another drive, anywhere on the drive, as long as bootitng is used as a boot manager, I can install an image (Linux or Windows) anywhere on the drive and as many copies as I want. Right now, because Fedora has had it's dependency hell issues in the past, I have two copies of it installed derived from the same image.