How to boot a physical hard drive with qemu?

[dariyoosh]

Hello every one,

I have installed both Windows Vista and Fedora Core 8.0 on the same
hard drive, and I use

/dev/sda1   is my  Windows partition
/dev/sda2   is my  linux partition

I read on some HOWTo that it is possible to virtualize a physical hard drive
by using qemu, but when I run this (as a normal user and not root),

$ qemu  -snapshot  -boot c -hda /dev/sda

I see the qemu emulator opens, and for a moment I see the
Grub interface where you choose Windows or Linux, but just after
that qemu stops and does nothing, and you have to Ctrl + C to quit.
I checked the kernel and all of the qemu and kqemu modules are there
and activated.
Any idea??

Thanks,

[sideways]

Increase the grub timeout and make sure you do not select your linux installation for boot (You cannot boot a virtual session on your currently booted partition sda2, even if it worked it would probably cause disk corruption) ie you have to select the windows boot.

Even then , I'm not sure how safe this is. Really you ought to set up a separate hardware profile for qemu in windows first. See this howto, for how it is done in vmware
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forum/...d.php?t=166890

You should also specify the memory to use, at least 256Mb (the default is 128mb)

qemu -snapshot -m 256 -boot c -hda /dev/sda &

[dariyoosh]

Thanks for your answer, however I still have the same problem. But I think
you are right about the hardware profile, I have to install Windows on another
hard disk, this will be safer and besides, as Linux and Windows are on the same
physical hard drive /dev/sda, this means that the hard drive is already mounted
while I'm using Linux.

May be this causes the problem.

Thanks for your answer