>> Cons 2: Converting the VirtualBox vdi disk to "raw" and using it as DomU >> disk hasn't worked. It just leads to "blue screen of death". (A fresh >> installation of WinXP works, but my constraint is to carry the node locked >> software as explained above.) >> > > This *may* be just a simple case of the disk geometry not matching. The
If it is really a virtual disk conversion problem, Mayuresh, I would try to convert it with VBoxManage instead of qemu-img, or the other way around. Both support RAW, QCOW2 and VDI. Depending on the conversions, the one works better than the other. You can indeed check whether the conversion was successful by checking the geometry of the disk image. You can also further mount a partition from it with a Gnu/Linux system with losetup, partprobe, eventually partx, and ntfs-3g. If everything is fine, it is rather about the drivers: 1. check what possibilities you have to change the device type presented to the HVM guest. I do RAW on Blktap2 with `tap:tapdisk:aio` but I think just `file:` does the same nowadays. Maybe there is an alternative. 2. try to install the GPLPV drivers before the conversion -- https://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Windows_GplPv
