From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.33) id 1BUqJ9-0000In-Go for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 31 May 2004 13:10:43 -0400 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.33) id 1BUqJ7-0000Hs-CB for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 31 May 2004 13:10:42 -0400 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.33) id 1BUqJ7-0000Hi-9j for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 31 May 2004 13:10:41 -0400 Received: from [206.72.67.39] (helo=claudius.sentinelchicken.org) by monty-python.gnu.org with smtp (Exim 4.34) id 1BUqIY-0002cS-PQ for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 31 May 2004 13:10:07 -0400 Date: Mon, 31 May 2004 10:10:05 -0700 From: Tim Message-ID: <20040531171005.GC10750@sentinelchicken.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Subject: [Qemu-devel] booting from /dev/hd? Reply-To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org List-Id: qemu-devel.nongnu.org List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org 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? 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... 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