On 08/09/2014 06:57 AM, arnaud gaboury wrote: You will not be able to boot the same Windows installation both on bare metal and in a virtual machine, but not for the reasons you are suspecting. The problem is that the hardware presented to the operating system of the virtual machine is *not* identical to the real hardware. Because the hardware is different, the Windows installation will believe that it has been moved to new hardware, it will try to install a bunch of different drivers and, maybe most importantly, it will require a re-activation (whatever that entails these days). For that reason, you'll need to have two separate installations of Windows on the machine, one in a normal disk partition for booting Windows on bare metal, and one (probably file-based) that is booted by the virtual machine. The virtual machine can still have access to the partition used by the real hardware, but as a data disk; that way both installations can have access to the same data files. The filesystem format used by the virtual machines is of no consequence at all to qemu or libvirt. They present a disk *device* to the virtual machine, and it is up to the virtual machine to interpret the sectors on that device in whatever way it wants. Neither libvirt nor qemu does anything with the contents of the disk device, so it doesn't care what filesystem format is used. Where is it that you see libvirt "accepting" FAT32? Probably that is correct. I don't know as I haven't used Windows since XP :-) Sure. 1) Don't think about it so hard :-) 2) Get your machine dual booting. 3) create a virtual machine in Linux, using whatever type of storage you like (but *not* the original Windows partition!) and install Windows in that virtual machine. I would recommend ignoring all the stuff about storage pools/volumes in libvirt; that is really intended for managing storage in very large installations with lots of virtual machines, and migration of virtual machines between physical hosts. The simplest thing is to just use virt-manager to create the virtual machine, let it do its default file-based disk device, and give it NN GB of space (however much you think you'll need to install Windows plus all the applications). 4) Once the virtual machine is running Windows well, add a disk device which points directly to the bare metal Windows partition. This will be a secondary drive for the virtual windows, *not* the boot drive.