Converting QEMU Harddisk to native Partition

Hi all,

I have currently virtualized two partitions (/dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3) that are exposed as QEMU Harddisks to the Windows XP Guest (Drive C and D there).
Are there possibilities to convert or adapt those to native partitions or native disks so that I could theoretically boot the Windows that is placed in the virtual disk natively?

Thanks!

Quoted 8 lines

I have currently virtualized two partitions (/dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3) that are exposed as QEMU Harddisks to the Windows XP Guest (Drive C and D there).
Are there possibilities to convert or adapt those to native partitions or native disks so that I could theoretically boot the Windows that is placed in the virtual disk natively?

Anything that works on real hardware is likely to work if run in a guest. At the very least, one of several similar and equivalent methods would be, create another virtual disk a bit bigger than the Windows partition you want to make native and attach it to a VM with the Windows partition you want to make native and boot a linux rescue disk. Put a linux file system on the new disk and mount it (say at /mnt/workspace) then, assuming the Windows partition you want to make native is hda1:

# dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/mnt/workspace/windowsCdrive.img bs=1M
# dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/mnt/workspace/windowsDdrive.img bs=1M
# scp /mnt/workspace/windows*img user@vmhost:~/

I'm assuming you get how that would give you a block copy of the guest partitions as files on the host, which you could then lay down on a real disk via dd and a USB device for example.

Quoted 16 lines · David Mair

Quoted 8 lines

I have currently virtualized two partitions (/dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3) that are exposed as QEMU Harddisks to the Windows XP Guest (Drive C and D there).
Are there possibilities to convert or adapt those to native partitions or native disks so that I could theoretically boot the Windows that is placed in the virtual disk natively?

Anything that works on real hardware is likely to work if run in a guest. At the very least, one of several similar and equivalent methods would be, create another virtual disk a bit bigger than the Windows partition you want to make native and attach it to a VM with the Windows partition you want to make native and boot a linux rescue disk. Put a linux file system on the new disk and mount it (say at /mnt/workspace) then, assuming the Windows partition you want to make native is hda1:

Quoted 8 lines

# dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/mnt/workspace/windowsCdrive.img bs=1M
# dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/mnt/workspace/windowsDdrive.img bs=1M
# scp /mnt/workspace/windows*img user@vmhost:~/

I'm assuming you get how that would give you a block copy of the guest partitions as files on the host, which you could then lay down on a real disk via dd and a USB device for example.

Yeah, I thought about a similar approach already but it looked too complex to me :-) I assume that my hardware resources might be too limited for such an operation, but I will give it a try. For saving space I could try to do a .gz or .tgz out of it right (using "dd | tar...")?
Are there other possibilities from the host side to handle that? I heard about the qemu-img tool but it doesn't seem to match my usecase. Or have I just missed some parameters?