Anyone knowledgeable with KVM and customizing VM guests

[the_holo]

Hi
I have been struggling for a solid week now to get a homelab virtualization server going with a newly purchased Ryzen system, and have had the most success with a Debian 9 install with KVM.
I purchased a Broadcom LSI SAS 9207-8i Host Bus Adapter with sas->sata cables, which I have setup the whole device passthough itself into a Windows 2008 VM, that will be a fileserver/dlna server.

I use the mainboards built in Sata ports for the SSD where debian 9 is installed.

The problem is in the windows guest, the LSI controller with all it's disk gets reported first (disk 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 etc) before the diskimage where I want the OS to be, and this naturally causes windows to spread out it's startfiles and bootsectors and whatnot on other disks while also failing to boot if i add or remove a disk in the controller.

This is not very flexible and so far the only option has been to reinstall the guest windows as soon as i change the disk configuration, so I have to ask, Is there a way to force the virtualmachine disk to be disk 0 in the guest?

I'm -not- very well traversed with linux so consider me a total noob!

/Holo

[pcalvert]

Hi,

Try this option: "-hda <path-to-VM-disk-image>"

An example showing how I booted Windows XP:

Code: Select all

$ kvm -localtime -m 512 -hda WinXP.qcow2 -hdb FAT32-5GB.img

That command was executed from within the directory containing the disk image files.

Phil