Re: [libvirt] How do I import an old VM image to a new Install
On 11/25/2009 11:36 AM, Michael N. Moran wrote:
First, I am a casual VM user. I have been using
Fedora Core 7 on my Dell laptop for a couple of
years with a single QEMU/KVM guest running Windoze XP.
I recently installed Fedora 12 on a new hard disk
and would like to use my old Windows VM image
on the new install.
Is there an easy way to do this?
I tried copying the image itself (WindozeXpDisk.raw)
to the new install and then (naively) looked for an
import on the Virtual Machine Manager GUI. The closest
that I found was the File->Restore saved machine.
I tried that on my WindozeXpDisk.raw image and it
failed as follows:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/manager.py",
line 461, in restore_saved_callback
newconn.restore(file_to_load)
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/connection.py",
line 649, in restore
self.vmm.restore(frm)
File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/libvirt.py",
line 1420, in restore
if ret == -1: raise libvirtError ('virDomainRestore()
failed', conn=self)
libvirtError: operation failed: image magic is incorrect
Restore isn't what you want here, and though the above error sounds
scary it is actually correct. Restore starts a VM that was previously
'saved', which is kind of like suspend to ram on a physical machine.
You should be able to use virt-install --import to get what you want,
something like
virt-install --name foo --ram 1024 --os-variant winxp --import --disk
path=/path/to/your/disk/image ...
- Cole