Re: [Qemu-devel] booting from /dev/hd?

[Antony T Curtis]

On Mon, 2004-05-31 at 18:10, Tim wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I know it is considered dangerous, but I am willing to accept the
> risk...  Has anyone been able to boot a virtual machine from their main
> boot drive while the drive is in use?

Yes, but I made a COW image from the hard drive so I don't trash the
hard drive for real.

> More specifically, I have a dual boot system, win2k/debian, and I would
> like to try booting windoze from this disk as a guest OS while running
> the linux system from this same disk.  In order to protect my disk from
> erroneous writes, I planned on running the vm system with -snapshot.
> 
> I have tried this, and with basic options:
> 
> qemu -hda /dev/hda -snapshot -boot c
> 
> my bootloader (grub) comes up just fine, but once I select win2k, it
> reports a disk read error.  When booting Debian, it loads the kernel and
> tries to begin booting, but just hangs.  This may be because my kernel
> is customized for my Athlon though...  
> I figured the windoze issue might be a geometry problem, so I ran 
> `fdisk -l /dev/hda' and then used that geometry:
> 
> qemu -hda /dev/hda -snapshot -boot c -hdachs 4865,255,63
> 
> and I get the same results.  Perhaps I need to use a non-LBA geometry or
> something?  I really don't know much about disk geometry, just a
> guess...

Try to do it with LBA Compat geometry.... -hdachs 77536,16,63 in your
case...

> 
> Has anyone tried doing something similar to what I am attempting?  If
> so, did you have any success, and what did you try that I haven't?  I am
> pretty sure I have permissions right in the host OS, is there anything I
> am forgetting?
> 
> thanks,
> tim
> 
> 
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Antony T Curtis <address@hidden>