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Re: Make grub treat a virtual hard disk as a physical hard disk


From: Swapnesh Chaubal
Subject: Re: Make grub treat a virtual hard disk as a physical hard disk
Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2011 16:00:43 -0400

Thank you for the quick reply Len, but it raised more questions in my mind than it answered.

As for why I am doing this, it is a project that I am working on. I need to boot physical machines using virtual images via network. One use of the project is to keep each file systems as a single file on the server and booting from there. The physical machine will be dummy terminal with nothing much on it.

Booting the physical machine is only part of the bigger problem which is to boot it via a network.

Thanks,
Swapnesh

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 3:41 PM, Lennart Sorensen <address@hidden> wrote:
On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 03:37:32PM -0400, Swapnesh Chaubal wrote:
> I am working on booting a physical machine using VHD files (regarding which
> I have not accomplished much) and I believe one way to go about it would be
> to make grub treat a virtual hard disk as physical hard disk. This way, the
> physical machine does not need to know what it is booting from and the rest
> of the booting and running should proceed as it normally does.
>
> Is there any way to achieve this?

And who is going to map the VHD file to the physical disk for the system
running from the VHD file?

You probably could convince grub to read a filesystem, find a vhd file,
teach grub how to parse it and figure out how to find the right offsets
in it to read its filesystem and find the kernel to boot that way, but
you still have the larger problem of then making that kernel work with
a VHD file rather than direct hardware access (in fact it would have to
do both.  Read the physical device and filesystem to get at the vhd and
read that).

I really have to wonder what the point of the exercise is?

--
Len Sorensen

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