RE: [Xen-users] Re: dual boot windows

["Turk, JohnX" <johnx.turk@xxxxxxxxx>]

I haven't seen any official guides on installing a Windows guest on Xen. But it 
seems that the way to do it is fairly simple:

Make an ISO image of the installation CD and use that as the "CDROM" while 
installing.

When the installer screen comes up and says "Press F6 to load third party 
drivers...", don't press F6, but press F5. You won't see anything immediately, 
but shortly you will see a screen that says to manually choose your HAL. Simply 
choose "Standard PC" and your install should go smoothly. The only downside is 
that you can't install a 64-bit flavor of Windows, nor can you get 
multi-processor support. 

-------------

I think this is also the same reason that you will not be able to boot an 
already installed copy of Windows in Xen. Typically the HAL is for an ACPI PC, 
or if you have dual core or hyperthreading, the HAL will be Multiprocessor ACPI 
PC, which I don't believe anybody has working in Xen just yet.



-----Original Message-----
From: xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
[mailto:xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Terje J. Hanssen
Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2006 1:13 PM
To: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [Xen-users] Re: dual boot windows

Turk, JohnX wrote:


> While it may be possible to do, I would strongly recommend against it. The 
> thing is that the virtualized hardware is completely different from what the 
> actual hardware in your system is. Lets say you load Windows on your machine 
> baremetal, it sees a nice new Intel chipset, GeForce video card, and a SATA 
> hard drive. Then when you try to boot that partition with Xen, it suddenly 
> being thrown a completely different set of hardware. It now is seeing a 
> Cirrus Logic video card, some older generic chipset, and an IDE hard drive. 
> This will most likely cause your system to blue screen, or worst case you 
> will have some major data loss.

It seems reasonable to add:
Does there exist any official installation guide for how to install and
setup Linux+Windows on Xen?

Rgds,
Terje J. Hanssen


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