Re: [Qemu-devel] harddrives and QEMU

["Brett (Mare) Henley" <mare@shires.org>]

To Clerify since there are a lot of variables here I'll define the test 
bed I'm working with.

I have 3 external ide drives.

12G, 6G and 4G. not a one has a dos partition on them.
they were partitioned with fdisk and then had the os's installed on them.

the 12G was a dd copy of the 6 gig with some growing of the filesystem
to handle the greater room.

Both the 6G and the 12G are FreeBSD and both booth flawlessly on my
3G HP laptop. Via a usb-ide adaptor. (Bytecc's BT-200)

the 4G I built with puppy linux to test and installed it using
the USB adaptor. It booted just fine but would not in QEMU.

I then stripped the 4G drive and installed puppy linux via qemu
using -hda \\.\PhysicalDrive1 -hdachs 8912,15,63 (I had to use this 
otherwise the drive did not size up to be installable)

Puppy Linux installed as was directly bootable using -hda 
\\.\PhysicalDrive1 without the -hdachs definition.

Trying to boot this drive striaght from the usb adaptor on my HP
laptop failed because the drive was expecting hda1 for the filesystem
and in Linux that ends up being sda1. So I had to tweak grub into
using sda1 to be the root and boot.

That worked. But this is why I suggested being able to emulate other 
drive interfaces.

When I'm testing. I'm running winxp sp2. QEMU loads the booter and
the kernel and tries to come up but when it gets to sizing the harddrive
it chews up memory and slows the platform down to a crawl. eventually
giving a drive size that would make Google proud. like 200Petabytes..
It clunks on and trying to shut down qemu takes a long time to get it
to switch to the console and accept the quit command.

Let me know what you think. :)

The trouble making hard drive maniac.

Me


Thomas Steffen wrote:
> On 10/6/05, *Karl Magdsick* <kmagnum@gmail.com 
> <mailto:kmagnum@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     I wrote:
>      > 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.
> 
>     Here I'm of course presuming that partitions aren't overlapping.
> 
> 
> That is an interesting idea. On every other system I know, there is one 
> partition that includes the whole disc. So if the partitioning is the 
> problem here, it should be possible to create one partition that spans 
> the whole disc (overlapping all other partitions), even with the 
> classical IBM PC partition scheme. fdisk in expert mode should be able 
> to do that.
> 
> Of course the next question is how happy windows is accessing this 
> partition. Should be an interesting experiment at least.
> 
> Thomas
> 
> !DSPAM:4345463a357575300763055!
> 
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