[plug] One of those days

[Brad Campbell]

So I've been using qemu as long as I can remember. I originally wrote the absolute positioning tablet driver for it (which Anthony Liguori cleaned up and submitted because I wasn't familiar with source control).

qemu became kvm, and I use kvm with libvirt a *lot*.

Recently my wife bought a second hand VW which is much newer than the 2006 model she had, so I thought I'd better get a copy of the right software.
Back when he had the old one I could download and install onto a VM. With this one we're right on the cusp of available software and the only available software was pre-installed on a windows 7 VMware VM.

So I converted the the vmdk to a qcow2 and installed it on my system, where it steadfastly blue screened on boot. Long story short, it'd boot on "pc" (i440fx) emulated hardware, but the latest stuff likes a "q35" and it would not play with that. I even tried force installing the virtio drivers, but it just would not boot. That made running it on my VM host problematic as I didn't have an old template available to copy and recent libvirt wouldn't create one for me.

After a lot of faffing about (and lots of google time) it turns out I could get it to boot by installing an old ide driver on the q35 machine. Once it had booted I could run the startup fix and from then on it was fine.

 -device piix3-ide,id=legacyide \
 -drive file=export-disk2.qcow2,if=none,id=disk \
 -device ide-hd,drive=disk,bus=legacyide.0  \

Just a painful gotcha that took me a lot longer than it should have due to some Windows gremlin.

Swines!

Regards,
Brad