QEMU

jesus92gz · 03-14-2015, 05:39 AM

Hello.

I have got Debian 7.8 Wheezy installed on my computer. I have got a partition with Windows 8.1 installed.

I would like to know if there is some way I can use this partition as a "virtual disk" but that it will not be "virtual" anymore, but that it will access the partition, reading and writting it, executing it in a virtual machine.

After searching in Google I could not find the way to accomplish this.

I'm using QEMU-KVM and virt-manager as GUI to perform administration tasks.

veerain · 03-14-2015, 07:48 AM

Using plain qemu you can pass the partition as an option like '-hda /dev/sdx'.

But if Windows is installed before it may not function. Although you can do clean install within qemu.

jesus92gz · 03-14-2015, 08:38 AM

Thanks for your reply.

I have tried:

Code:

qemu -hda /dev/sdaX

Where X the number of the C partition.

But after trying this command it is stuck in start screen: Booting from hard disk...

Windows was installed prior Debian

I have installed a Windows Server clean install, but it would be great if I could mount the Windows 8.1 partition as well.

If I run qemu -hda /dev/sda it is displaying just a message: GRUB but not showing the GRUB screen nor rEFInd boot manager that's installed.

veerain · 03-17-2015, 04:29 AM

I said a new install in qemu. It is not showing grub or refind because by default qemu uses a BIOS and not a UEFI. It is better if you install Windows in BIOS Compatibility mode. And even qemu has a tianocore UEFI image named OVMF. By default it uses seabios. Debian docs may help or web search for tianocore/ovmf.