I've been reading more about P2V* and most guides only mention their troubles on slipstreaming drivers into an already existent windows installation - but I notice that this is only applied for Vmware software.
QEmu comes with XP recognizable emulated drivers, sizes under a megabyte - doesn't require any installs and is free!
So why not using qemu instead of any vmware??
People might say that speed matters, but I'm not much worried about this - all it's necessary is to boot onto a OS found inside the disk and do my repairs.
*P2V stands for Peer to Virtual - making an OS installed on a physical machine run inside a PC emulator
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How to P2V with qemu?
Warning: This is experimental and very likely to damage your installed OS
My tests were done on my laptop where I keep three partitions.
The first two partitions were used for installing OS's (both XP) and the third one is where documents are kept. So this machine is dual booting to an OS on each partition.
Each OS was installed using an nlited source (not many changes, only a few tweaks).
How to setup your tools to get started?
If you're using winbuilder - open the Code box tab then copy&paste:
[main] Title=Qemu test Description=quick P2V with qemu [process] ShellExecute,open,#$q%Tools%\qEMU\qEmu.exe#$q,"-boot c -m 192 -hda \\.\PhysicalDrive0 -L #$q%Tools%\qEMU#$q"
What will this do?
Notice the -hda \\.\PhysicalDrive0 - it will use your physical disk and boot from it - on my case it will display the initial boot menu to select which OS to boot (I'm not using grub or anything else - remember I have two XP OS's installed?).
I select the second OS - which is used for these testings - and the OS is a bit sluggier but boots ok!!
No changes were done, no tweaks to slipstream drivers on the OS installed on disk - nothing. Just run qemu and boot the machine.
Beware that this only worked twice - after these trials this test OS started to BSOD without solution (guess it needs to be reinstalled..) - if you're willing to try it out - beware it will very likely damage the tested OS
This is the easy way to p2v instantly - you can also use command line from cmd.exe, but the parameters may give you a little more work to get right unless you have some experience with DOS commands.
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Need your help!
This was fun, but I need help to understand the reasons why the OS becomes damaged after a while. There can be all sort of reasons but would be really great if anyone could test and reproduce this quick P2V - as you can see - it's so easy that it would be shame that we wouldn't even try to learn more - what do you think?
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Also think that ACPI is the reason why boot up is a slug - look here - I'm using a dual core CPU so this would be a good reason to give confusions when emulating the OS.
Standard ACPI can also be used when installing windows for the first time (good to speed up inside a virtual machine) - if you press F7 when the initial "Press F6 to install drivers.." appears on the install setup or F5 to have a menu to choose an appropriate HAL that supports ACPI
http://www.hs-lab.co..... Problems.php
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One other idea is to add an image that keeps all changes that supposely should be made on the physical disk, then choosing to commit the changes to disk if needed.
Anyone wishes to help on this part?
Have fun - and remember - only use this info on test machines..
