[Qemu-devel] Installing XP and Partition Sizes

[Bernd Herd]

Hallo,

while converting my existing vmware machines to qemu I found that some 
boot and others don't. I've installed Windows XP using the current CVS 
branch of Qemu.

I found that the problem is caused by the fact, that qemu doesn't 
support all combinations of cylinmders, heads and sectors. My hypothesis 
is that a start partition ending beyond a cylinder number of 1023 can 
cause problems.

Using the informations retrieved from raw images using

 /sbin/fdisk imagename.raw

it seems that the maximum size of the booting partition is about 480 
MByte. This is not sufficient to Install Windows XP.

I think that if any part of the Windows booting environment is beyond 
the first 480 MByte, then the system is unable to start.

My solution was to create a 2 GByte Image and create two partitions: a 
small one (to boot from) and a big one to hold the main part of Windows 
XP. This can be done within the windows XP installer. Using this 
approach XP installed without any problem (and can be rebooted...).

Using this approach I was also able to convert my Windows NT 
environments from vmware to qemu. I installed a small temporary NT 
environment into a 480 MB partition, copied the bigger system into the 
small partition with xcopy and used the copy with qemu. That way I was 
able to boot vmware machines that did not boot before.

Yours

        Bernd Herd

                :-)