Final edit: I got all the Linux stuff right but made a dumb mistake generating the image on the Windows side. Watching the VM boot right now. Thanks to all for your support!

Contemplating Fedora Kinoite for work daily driver. Need to prove that I can virtualize an existing physical Windows 11 machine. Using Bazzite on a personal laptop as a host test bed.

Test host seems to be set up correctly. I layered the packages in the virtualization group, layered virtio-win (from downloaded rpm package), added my user to the libvert group, and enabled libvirtd. After a reboot or two, I can connect with the Virtual Machine Manager and define my VM.

On physical machine I used Disk2vhd to generate a vhdx. Moved that file to the test host and converted to qcow2. Copied disk image to /var/lib/libvert/images and added it as my drive image when I defined the VM.

VM starts but will not boot. Stupid question: Should I have installed virt-win-gt-x64.msi from the virtio-win ISO on the source Windows install before I created the vhdx?

Edit: Since I posted, I installed a Debian guest from scratch in this environment and it runs like a champ. 👍

  • mvirts@lemmy.world
    2·
    21 days ago

    Do you get any output when you try to boot?

    Maybe mount a win 11 install media and try to repair?

    Does your VM meet win 11 requirements? (Idk what these are but I hear it needs Tpm 2.0)

    • sgibson5150@slrpnk.netOP
      2·
      21 days ago

      Ty for response! Error is BdsDxe: failed to load Boot0001 etc. I do have TPM hardware on the host. See pic below.

      Good suggestion on repair. Had to do that one time when virtualizing a Win8.1 box back in the day, though I recall I at least got a Windows logo at boot on that occasion.

      • mvirts@lemmy.world
        2·
        21 days ago

        Wild guess without looking anything up: looks like your VM UEFI isn’t finding the windows bootloader.

        Can you enter the boot manager menu? For GRUB I had to add a boot entry in my ancient UEfi firmware before it would boot.

        It’s also possible that your VM is set to boot from a device that isn’t available for some reason. Can you look at more detailed logs? Something like the qemu-system console output? Maybe it would be in your kernel logs or journalctl

        • sgibson5150@slrpnk.netOP
          2·
          21 days ago

          Agreed on your assessment. I’m beginning to suspect I did all the Linux stuff right but screwed up on the Windows side. Copying over a new vhdx right now. ⏳

          No grub involved in this scenario. Machine being virtualized is Windows only.