[CentOS-virt] virtio not installing correctly

[Zoltan Frombach]

Hi,

I did many physical (Windows) to virtual (kvm) conversions before. The 
instructions in general are good here: 
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Boot_from_virtio_block_device , so yes, 
you must add a dummy ("fake") 2nd disk drive to the guest first, boot up 
the guest, install the virtio drivers to that 2nd virtual HDD and after 
that you can shutdown the guest, remove the dummy drive from the guest's 
config and switch the original 1st disk's setting from IDE to virtio. 
The whole reason for adding a 2nd dummy disk is the ability to install 
the virtio driver inside Windows while it is booted up from an IDE disk.

I ran into one gotcha recently when I was converting an old Windows 7 
image to KVM though: the virtio drivers just did not work in Windows at 
first, because Windows could not verify the signatures of the virtio 
drivers and it was unwilling to use them. I had to fully update those 
old Windows 7 systems via the Windows Update service. After that Windows 
7 was able to recognize the signatures on the latest virtio drivers and 
started to use them. I believe that in an old Windows which was not 
updated for years, the root certificates are outdated and virtio drivers 
cannot be verified.

I hope this helps.

Z.

On 2/2/2016 11:39 AM, isdtor wrote:
> I have converted a physical machine to kvm, following instructions on the proxmox wiki. So far so good. Now I'm attempting to convert the vm from ide to virtio following the instructions here, http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Boot_from_virtio_block_device, with virtio-win-stable from Fedora.
>
> The guest is running Windows XP. When the new hardware wizard popped up finding the RedHat VirtIO SCSI controller, I pointed it to the viostor/xp directory on the iso. It appears as if all files have been copied, viostor.sys to C:\Windows\system32\DRIVERS, the green progress bar goes all the way to the right, but it's been sitting there over night with no further progress.
>
> There is a vioscsi directory on the iso, but it contains no drivers for XP.
>
> >From a previous attempt, I know that if I reboot the vm now and try to enter safe mode, it will hang after loading the agp driver.
>
> Host OS is CentOS 6.7.
>
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