Re: Converting QEMU Harddisk to native Partition

[Erik Rull <erik.rull@rdsoftware.de>]

David Mair wrote:
>
>> I have currently virtualized two partitions (/dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3)
>> that are exposed as QEMU Harddisks to the Windows XP Guest (Drive C and
>> D there).
>> Are there possibilities to convert or adapt those to native partitions
>> or native disks so that I could theoretically boot the Windows that is
>> placed in the virtual disk natively?
>>
> Anything that works on real hardware is likely to work if run in a
> guest. At the very least, one of several similar and equivalent methods
> would be, create another virtual disk a bit bigger than the Windows
> partition you want to make native and attach it to a VM with the Windows
> partition you want to make native and boot a linux rescue disk. Put a
> linux file system on the new disk and mount it (say at /mnt/workspace)
> then, assuming the Windows partition you want to make native is hda1:
>
> # dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/mnt/workspace/windowsCdrive.img bs=1M
> # dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/mnt/workspace/windowsDdrive.img bs=1M
> # scp /mnt/workspace/windows*img user@vmhost:~/
>
> I'm assuming you get how that would give you a block copy of the guest
> partitions as files on the host, which you could then lay down on a real
> disk via dd and a USB device for example.
>

Yeah, I thought about a similar approach already but it looked too complex 
to me :-) I assume that my hardware resources might be too limited for such 
an operation, but I will give it a try. For saving space I could try to do 
a .gz or .tgz out of it right (using "dd | tar...")?
Are there other possibilities from the host side to handle that? I heard 
about the qemu-img tool but it doesn't seem to match my usecase.
Or have I just missed some parameters?

Thanks.

Best regards,

Erik