booting an XP partition via qemu --enable-kvm

[Joel Roth]

Hi all,

First, thanks for opening your list to the whole
world's questions.

I'd like to troubleshoot an XP partition image.

First, I copied it with dd:

   dd if=/dev/hda1 of=xp_partition

Now I would like to boot it:

   qemu --enable-kvm  -hda xp_partition

This displays the SEA BIOS line, then hangs at "Booting from Hard Disk".

What I imagine is that BIOS transfers controls to the boot
record, however no boot loader is present, and there is
no partition table.

Most of my recent experience is with grub-legacy; that would
be my preferred boot loader.  I know that GRUB is quite
flexible, and will probably do what I want if I can
install/configure it properly.

Can someone give me a couple pointers:

0) Is it practical to do what I'm attempting? (does anyone
   know if XP will even boot this way?)
1) how to install a boot loader in the boot record
   of the partition image
2) how to get the boot loader to look for its files in the 
   partition image's file system
3) how to adjust to the disk image having no partition table.
   Do I treat this partition image like a floppy disk image?

Thanks for your interest.

Regards

-- 
Joel Roth