Comments on: Converting a Physical disk to a Virtual disk with Qemu’s qemu-img on Windows

By: Nick B.

Nick B. — Sun, 21 Jan 2018 20:16:16 +0000

In reply to neozeed. I made an image of the CF card and worked with that but still had some problems with fdisk and disklabel. Then I tried Qemu with -M isapc and it worked. Made a minimal installation and transferred everything across with dump/restore. Next step is to see if I can write it back to the CF and get it to boot on real hardware.

By: neozeed

neozeed — Sat, 20 Jan 2018 05:52:23 +0000

In reply to Nick B..

Some USB stuff seems to aggressively protect the first 512 bytes of disks, preventing stuff like partitioning and whatnot.

I’m not sure of what the exact issues are, but generally run it as administrator, and bring up disk manager and make sure no volumes are mounted. You may even have to “eject or dismount” the disk from disk manager… Not the dock icon.

By: Nick B.

Nick B. — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 11:52:11 +0000

In reply to neozeed. Seems to be a problem writing back the the CF disk. The CF card is mounted in a CF-ATA converter and ATA-USB converter so W10 sees it as a real drive. When I try to FDISK and write out the boot sector I just see lots of "hard error writing to fsbn" messages.

qemu-system-i386 -drive file=WD540MB.qcow2 -drive format=raw,media=disk,file=\\.\PhysicalDrive1

By: neozeed

neozeed — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 01:48:54 +0000

In reply to Nick B.. That will be the real trick. But in a worst case, you can now do a dump/restore if it's not too happy, at least preserving the contents

By: Nick B.

Nick B. — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 23:23:58 +0000

Excellent tip! I’ve just used this to make an image of a FreeBSD_4.7 on a flaky 2.5″ 540MB Western Digital drive. Next step is to attempt to move the image to a Compact Flash card so I can carry on using it with real hardware.