Virtualize an existing windows 8.1 installation on arch

Question

Hi,
3 days ago I installed arch and I'm very delighted. Originally coming from windows I installed ubuntu on my laptop a few months back. Linux instantly grabbed my attention. So when I decided to buy a new desktop PC I compared various distros and arch was the most promising one. I haven't been disappointed; The learning curve is very good and the distro is really well documented. But now I have a problem where the documentation can't help.
I have the following setup:
- Intel i5 4570s
- SSD for os
  - sda1: EFI boot partition
  - sda2: ext4 with arch installed
  - sda3: swap
  - sda4: microsoft reserved
  - sda5: ntfs with windows 8.1 installed
- HDD for data
- EFI motherboard
Install order: arch -> windows
Before I installed arch I read an article about how to boot virtual in an existing windows installation and nonetheless be able to boot normally into it and have the instances synced. Later I found out: VirtualBox isn't capable of booting an EFI windows installation.
As I read in another blog, other virtualization software like QEMU is able to boot an EFI windows installation with OVMF. So I followed the first article and created a raw image of my windows disks with
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename w8raw.vmdk --rawdisk /dev/sda -partitions 1,4,5 -relative
and tried to open that image with QEMU via
qemu-system-x86_64 --enable-kvm -pflash OVMF.fd w8raw.vmdk
I get the following error
Unsupported image type 'partitionedDevice'
It may be noteworthy that the VBoxManage command produced two files
w8raw.vmdk
w8raw-pt.vmdk
Now my questions:
1) Is it somehow possible to open the created .vmdk file with QEMU?
2) Is it possible to create such an raw image with QEMU too? How? The documentation didn't help me
3) Do you have any other ideas how to archive this?
If you need further information I gladly add them here.

Answer 1

You have created a vmdk file that point to a real disk. The vmdk file does not contains the data in itself; probably qemu cannot open such virtual disk. The raw disk is simply /dev/sda in your case; you can pass it as an argument to qemu (provided you have the necessary permissions to access it), but ensure that the mounted partitions (the one you use in your running linux) are not accessed in any way by Windows (it should be the case if they are not FAT or NTFS and you do not have installed special tools in Windows to read them). Virtualbox can authorize the access of individual partitions of a physical disk (by using the VBoxManage command you mention), but I don't think this trick can be exported to qemu.
You can create a raw image of your disk by using the dd command:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/some-file.raw
but do that from a bootable recovery disk, do not mount /dev/sda while running dd (and have an external hard disk that is big enough to contain the whole image of /dev/sda).
But I doubt you will achieve your real goal. At the very best, Windows will consider that it run on a new hardware within the virtual machine. At best it will ask you to re-register and will cease to work if you boot it directly. Some OEM Windows do a BIOS/UEFI check to verify they have not be copied and will refuse to work in the virtual machine. You might also expect a whole bunch of problems because the same windows will run on two different hardware (virtual and physical). Windows has not been designed to be moved from one machine to another. If you want to have a virtual Windows, I would strongly suggest you to install it from scratch in the virtual machine. VirtualBox has more feature (some of them are really useful: e.g. the Windows additions that provide nice integration between the two machines; USB access, etc.) and is easier to manage than qemu. Just put VirtualBox in BIOS mode and install Windows (all Windows versions accept to be installed in BIOS mode).
Last edited by olive (2014-04-13 09:32:49)