Running 3.18.9-200.fc21.x86_64 qemu 2:2.1.3-3.fc21 libvirt 1.2.9.2-1.fc21 System is a Thinkpad X250 with Intel i7-5600u Broadwell GT2 I'm trying to replace the Win7 installation on my laptop with Fedora 21 and virtualizing Windows 7 for work purposes. I'd prefer to give the guest its own NTFS partition instead of using a file for both performance and ease of potential recovery. So I've set aside unpartitioned space on the hard disk and added /dev/sda to the virt-manager storage pool, created a new volume and assigned it to the guest as an IDE drive. Unfortunately, the Windows 7 installer does not see this drive despite being "IDE" and not virtio. If I use a qcow2 file as the drive, the installer has no problems detecting it. To eliminate virt-manager from the equation, I've also tried to do a very basic install using virt-install with similar results, the physical partition cannot be detected regardless of bus type (IDE/SATA/virtio) even with the signed Redhat virtio drivers loaded by the installer. I was unable to find any similar issues or solutions online except a 2 year old thread on linuxquestions which quoted that we must specify the whole disk instead of a partition. However, I cannot find the source of that quote. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-virtualization-and-cloud-90... Is this really the case and the reason why Windows 7 cannot see the physical partition or there is something else I am doing wrong?