Access windows dual boot partition as a vm in openSUSE

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Is there any means to access/mount the windows disk partition of a dual boot system as a vm in leap 15.5? Would need to be able to make persistent any changes made.

Right now I have dual boot windows10/leap15.5 and, additionally, windows as a libvirt qemu vm. The windows vm install is less capable than the dual boot partition install. I thought it would be good to use the dual boot install in a vm so as to avoid the reboot process and also keep leap15.5 active simultaneously.

Don’t ping me too hard if this is a stupid question.

tom kosvic

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@tckosvic not really on a partition, you could if you use a separate disk controller and disk. Is this a desktop and spare PCIe slots? Also depends on the system cpu, ram etc…

I run Windows 11 Pro in a vm, with a NVidia GT710 (vfio-pci) with 4 cores with hyperthreading (8 threads) and 32Gb of RAM. Windows vm allocates all the ram at boot.

Then I just use spice to connect from any system on the network.

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I have found a reference that shows how to open a windows dual boot partition as a vm in linux host using kvm. Reference is below:

I tried the script given therein and didn’t work but I am working through the errors as the system reports them to me.
I have to get a lot more understanding of kvm before I can get this working but it seems that it can be done.

I can’t get past “drive file=/usr/share/ovmf/x64/OVMF_CODE.fd” as I can’t find that file in openSUSE 0VMF files.

If anyone has more kvm knowledge and wishes to try this, I would like your insights.

thanks, tom kosvic

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@tckosvic it needs to be a separate disk, even in that example (/dev/sdb)…

Let me dig up my notes on what I did way back for the fd files.

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64 bit OVMF firmware is provided by qemu-ovmf-x86_64 package and installed under /usr/share/qemu/. Judging by CODE it should map to the *-code.bin file(s). For Microsoft you will probably want to use *-ms-*.bin which embeds Microsoft certificates for Secure Boot.

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Down in the comments in the ref article, someone asked that question and the author says that the windows partition can be on the same disk and he explains why.

tom kosvic

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From comments of @ arvidjaar, I can see that this is way beyond any experience I have had. Looks like it is more of a windows question than openSUSE. I’m not into IT at that level; just broken down retired engineer.

This would be a handy feature and I’ll keep hacking at this and report if I get some success.

thanks all, tom kosvic

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