Re: Booting up an old Windows 3.1 harddisk image

[Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@siemens.com>]

On 2011-10-18 12:42, Avi Kivity wrote:
> On 10/18/2011 02:59 AM, John Stoffel wrote:
>> Hi Guys,
>>
>> I'm not a subscriber to the kvm mailing list, so please copy me in
>> your replies.
>>
>> I've got an old image of an i486 disk running (I think!) Windows 3.1
>> which I want to bring up and play with, just to make sure I can use
>> it.  
>>
>>     > file hda-caroline486.image 
>>     hda-caroline486.image: x86 boot sector, Microsoft Windows XP mbr;
>>     partition 1: ID=0x6, active, starthead 1, startsector 17, 254983
>>     sectors, code offset 0x33
>>
>> I basically just dd'd the entire disk into a file.  I can mount it
>> using a loop device and then examine the partitions, so I think it's
>> fine from that viewpoint.
>>
>> My server is a Debian 5.0 box, running on AMD Quad Core CPU, 8gb of
>> RAM.  
> 
> What's the host kernel version?
> 
>> I've got other KVM guests running just fine.  
>>
>> So I tried to use the following to boot the image:
>>
>>   > sudo qemu -no-acpi -no-hpet -cpu 486 -hda hda-caroline486.image -m \
>>   128 -vga std -vnc quad:44
> 
> No need to sudo.
> 
>>
>> And I get the following in a VNC screen:
>>
>>     Starting SeaBIOS (version 0.5.1-20100616_222654-volta)
>>
>>     Booting from Hard Disk...
>>
>>     HIMEM: DOS XMS Driver, Version 3.07 - 02/14/92
>>     Extended Memory Specification (XMS) Version 3.0
>>     Copyright 1988-1992 Microsoft Corp.
>>
>>     Installed A20 handler number 2.
>>     64K High Memory Area is available.
>>
>>
>>     MICROSOFT Expanded Memory Manager 386  Version 4.44
>>     Copyright Microsoft Corporation 1986, 1991
>>
>>     _
>>
>>
>> And that's it.  So it looks like I'm missing a driver or something
>> here.  Do I need to define keyboard and mouse for this sucker?  The
>> hardware is long gone, but I think it was a Gateway.  Total guess.
>>
> 
> It's probably a bug in kvm.  Try collecting a complete trace as in
> http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Tracing and posting it here, maybe
> something will jump out.
> 
> Also try out -no-kvm.

A shot from the hips: Jörg and I are just hunting down 16 bit task
switch issues on AMD hosts. If this problem may be related can be
checked by loading kvm-amd with npt=0, ie. disabling nested paging.

Jan

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