Re: [Qemu-devel] harddrives and QEMU

[Jim C. Brown]

On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 01:22:33PM -0500, Brett (Mare) Henley wrote:
>   The Longer one goes into greater detail. WaxDragon's first suggestion 
> was to use -hdachs to define the drive for the bios. I had to read up 
> well to do this but entered 65383,16,63 as my definition and still ended 
> up with exactly the same behavior.

-hdachs doesn't make a difference, unless the OS reads the size of the
hard disk from the bios.

If it gets its size from the MBR or partition table, it won't help at all.

There is probably a way to force freebsd into using a certain size or c/h/s
value for the hard disk. I recommend trying this to see if its just the bad
disk size thats causing problems.

>   I also understand there's a problem with Linux QEMU accessing large 
> drives via device node.

No. That works fine.

>   Is there any work being done to fix or create options to make using 
> physical drives as easy as using image files?

They are as easy to use. It just happens that the syntax for Windows raw
access is uglier than /dev/hda.

>   Is there any work being done to let physical drives be considered
> another type of drive. Such as a usb drive instead of a ide drive. This 
> would help making os installation much simpler on hard drives from the 
> host OS.

'Fraid not. (At least nothing that I know of, perhaps someone else will step up
and announce usb-on-qemu support soon.)

Of course, even if qemu had support for usb that wouldn't necessarily solve
your problem.

> 
> Thanks.
> 

-- 
Infinite complexity begets infinite beauty.
Infinite precision begets infinite perfection.