[SOLVED] QEMU x86_64 booting local win10 drive "sda" with snapshot - stuck on booting. Debian 10.4

I don't know how to troubleshoot this and it doesn't seem like this is something very many do so I wasn't able to find any guides on it anywhere. The virtual machine stops with blinking marker on Booting from Hard Disk...

I don't expect you to have an answer for what's wrong here but I'm kind of lost as to where to even start. Is there a boot log somewhere I can check for errors or simply where it hangs?

Did it ever work as expected?

No, first time I'm running it. Tried through terminal and virtual machine manager. Realized I probably shouldn't run it through manager without setting sda to read only, but as far as I understand snapshot should be an okay alternative to it.

Not sure any VM supports officially booting from physical devices. Plenty of web how-to's on it though.

/dev/sda1 is a partition and may not include loader.

Secondly Windows has a HAL. A VM won't equal the HAL that was there when installed.

I specified "sda" instead of "sda1" because that's what I was recommended to do. From https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/images.html :

Hard disks can be used. Normally you must specify the whole disk (/dev/hdb instead of /dev/hdb1) so that the guest OS can see it as a partitioned disk. WARNING: unless you know what you do, it is better to only make READ-ONLY accesses to the hard disk otherwise you may corrupt your host data (use the -snapshot command line option or modify the device permissions accordingly).

Again I'm not expecting you to troubleshoot this for me, I just thought I'd ask here for ways to troubleshoot. Also from the same page:

In order to use VM snapshots, you must have at least one non removable and writable block device using the qcow2 disk image format. Normally this device is the first virtual hard drive.

I'm not entirely sure what this means, however it tells me that VM snapshots are snapshots of the complete virtual machine including CPU state, RAM, device state and the content of all the writable disks. I believe this means the partition where the snapshot saves to must have enough space to room all the content of the physical hard drive I'm trying to boot from. Does this seem right?

Originally Posted by jefro Secondly Windows has a HAL. A VM won't equal the HAL that was there when installed.

You're right; this is probably a waste of time.

Get a W10 iso from MS and make a new clean vm client from it. It will work for a while.