I was looking at the differences between a 1G and 2G initial qcow formatted image, and found that there wasn't much difference. Just a a size byte for the image, along with a difference in 4K of zeros at the end of the file. (This seems to be consistent for every increment of 1G at initial creation time)
Test #1) copy the 1G image and modify what I thought was the size byte. Running qemu-img info against that image produced an error. Seems qemu-img wants to read the initial bytes at the end of the file, even if there's nothing there. Test #2) copy the 1G image and modify the same byte. DD the last 4096 bytes from the 2G image and append it to the new 1G image. qemu-img info now recognizes it as a 2G image. Test #3) copy an existing 2G win98se install at 227MB and edit the size byte, modifying from 8 to c. qemu-img info now recognizes it as a 3G image. Qemu recognizes it now as a 3G disk with a 2G image. running qtparted found 1g of free space, and I expanded the win98 (fat32) partition to the maximum size. Then booted the win98 image and it now sees 3GB of space. This was just a hack, but it seems to indicate that qcow images could be grown on the fly, with the obvious implications that you also have to grow the file system that is in the image, or add another partition. Ben _______________________________________________ Qemu-devel mailing list Qemu-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/qemu-devel