Yassine Chaouche <a.chaou...@algerian-radio.dz> writes: > I have installed Linux Mint on my machine on /dev/sda5. Later, I > installed MX Linux on /dev/sda9, but the installation of MX eventually > didn't work well as I tried to do things. I need to fix MX linux, but > each I change something I need to reboot the machine to see if it > fixed it, and this is cumbersome/tiresome/awkward. What I would like > to do is boot on /dev/sda5 (Linux Mint) and run MX Linux (/dev/sda9) > in parallel. Can I achieve this with qemu ? I don't want to reinstall > MX as a virtual machine, I would like to run and fix the already > installed one.
It's perfectly possible, if MX Linux uses a generic initramfs like Debian. Minor tweaks may be needed to include all the necessary drivers in the initramfs. However, you have to be *very* careful to avoid booting Linux Mint in QEMU, which is (probably) the default if you pass the whole /dev/sda to QEMU and boot from that. This would lead to serious data loss because your host system uses the same partitions concurrently. Consider employing direct kernel boot (via -kernel, -initrd and -append), unless you want to fix the bootloader configuration of MX Linux. For this you have to copy out the kernel and the initrd files to the host system, because passing in mounted partitions is asking for trouble (see above). -- Feri
