Running Windows from Qubes VM ?

[ThierryIT]

Hello,

I have a laptop with two internal Hard Drives.
One HD with Windows 7 the second Hard Drive with Qubes on it.
Is it possible to run Windows 7 from a VM's Qubes instead of building a Win dows's VM ?

Thx

[awokd]

You might be able to create a Win 7 HVM inside Qubes, then use qvm-start
win7 --drive /dev/sdb5 (or wherever your Win7 bootable partition is
located) to start it. Never tried it though.

[ThierryIT]

Hello,

I am not able to use "qvm-start" because the HVM I have created is "Empty".
Dom0 is able to see my Windows 7 hard drive:
/dev/sdc2 /run/media/user/32E...CCB type fuseblk

From Dom0 I am able to have access to all my Window 7 files.

Any ideas ?

Thx

[awokd]

Can you provide the exact error message? Not sure why qvm-start would care
it's empty, it will still boot from a CDROM then too...

[ThierryIT]

Hi,
Seems to work better even if I am still not able to boot my windows.
With "fdisk" I can see that my bootable HDD is "sdc1".
From Dom0, when doing a : qvm-start vm-test --hddisk /dev/sdc1, I do have a popup from my Windows drive.

Booting from CDROM .... error code failaure 00002
Booting from Hard drive, failed no bootable disk ....

No bootable device ...

Ideas ?

[msg...@gmail.com]

Maybe there is no bootloader on /dev/sdc1? Try to boot from livecd and fix bootloader.

[awokd]

Maybe the boot sequence doesn't search hard drives attached like that, in
which case it won't work.

[Vít Šesták]

On Saturday, January 13, 2018 at 9:24:49 AM UTC+1, msg...@gmail.com wrote:
> Maybe there is no bootloader on /dev/sdc1? Try to boot from livecd and fix bootloader.

This is very likely. Bootloader is usually installed on whole drive (e.g., /dev/sdc) rather than on its partition (e.g., /dev/sdc1). I am not even sure if BIOS could boot from bootloader installed on a partition. Maybe also Windows do not like the fact they have just a partition and not a partition table.

Moreover, I do not recommend booting Windows this way. If they are on a partition accessible to dom0, the dom0 might try to parse its filesystem etc., which might expose some vulnerabilities. It seems to be more wise to convert the /dev/sdc1 to some image file (or a LVM volume, provided that you have carefully configured LVM, like Q4 has).