Re: [Qemu-devel] harddrives and QEMU

["Jim C. Brown" <jma5@umd.edu>]

On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 08:01:31AM -0400, Karl Magdsick wrote:
> 
> I hope someone else will chime in, but my guess is that the problem
> lies in that an MS Windows "drive" is really a partition, not the entire
> drive. Under Windows you're specifying the equivalent of
> the Linux /dev/hda1 , /dev/hda2, /dev/hdb1, /dev/hdb5 and not
> actually /dev/hda or /dev/hdb.

Ah. If that's true, that would perfectly explain the errors.

> In order to pass the "D drive" to qemu, and actually give QEMU access
> to the entire raw HD, the "D drive" partition would have to fill the entire
> HD, and MS Windows would have to make the MBR available as part
> of the first (only, in this case) partition on the HD.
> 
> I'm not sure if MS Windows includes the MBR in the first drive on the disk.
> 

If it doesn't then there's no way to boot from the first drive. Although
I was under the impression that Windows did in fact provide support for that,
the scheme may not work for USB drives.

> Presumably, you'd like QEMU to make up a fake partition table/MBR
> to present to the guest OS so that the guest OS sees a self-consistent
> disk.
> 
> -Karl
> 

That will become a must if Windows provides no way to access the full hard
disk drive.

-- 
Infinite complexity begets infinite beauty.
Infinite precision begets infinite perfection.