booting qemu from a physical NTFS disk

[Juergen Lock]

On Sat, Oct 29, 2005 at 01:10:36PM -0500, vladimir at math.uic.edu wrote:
> I have a dual-boot machine, with BSD-current running
> on the primary drive of the first IDE controller,
> and WinXP installed on the primary drive of the second IDE.
> Is there any way to boot Windows XP in qemu (running on
> FreeBSD host) from a WindowsXP physical drive?
> I googled for an answer, but didn't find anything definite.

>From the freenode #qemu faq:
http://lilly.csoft.net/~jeffryj/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/FrequentlyAskedQuestions

Can I run my Windows on my /dev/hda in qemu?

Short answer: Probably not.

Long answer: Once installed, Windows has only the minimal drivers required to boot the hardware on your computer - which happens to be completely different from what qemu emulates. Windows 9x has enough problems with this, but Windows NT is especially fickle. You may be able to boot Windows 95 or 98 work from qemu this way (there have been a few reports of success), but if you want to try we can not help you. You are better off installing Windows into a disk image. Windows XP Home or Windows XP Professional also has issues related to hardware activation.

If you really really want to try to set up Windows XP or Windows 2000 to be able to boot on both your real hardware and on qemu, try looking at [WWW] You receive a Stop 0x0000007B error after you move the Windows XP system disk to another computer and [WWW] How to Move a Hard Disk with Windows 2000 Installed to Another Computer, which explains part of the problem in greater detail as well as some possible workarounds. This is for really advanced users only. If you don't understand what this article says, or if you follow its instructions but they don't work for you, do not come to us for help. We probably won't know any more about the problem than you. Note: If you try this with XP Home or XP Professional, you will be required to re-activate XP.

[end quote]

 The easiest way to go about is proably to install windows into a qemu
image and then pass /dev/ad2 as -hdb so you can mount the data on there.

	Juergen