Virtio Not Installing Correctly

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I have converted a physical machine to kvm, following instructions on the proxmox wiki. So far so good. Now I’m attempting to convert the vm from ide to virtio following the instructions here, http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Boot_from_virtio_block_device, with virtio-win-stable from Fedora.

The guest is running Windows XP. When the new hardware wizard popped up finding the RedHat VirtIO SCSI controller, I pointed it to the viostor/xp directory on the iso. It appears as if all files have been copied, viostor.sys to C:\Windows\system32\DRIVERS, the green progress bar goes all the way to the right, but it’s been sitting there over night with no further progress.

There is a vioscsi directory on the iso, but it contains no drivers for XP.

From a previous attempt, I know that if I reboot the vm now and try to enter safe mode, it will hang after loading the agp driver.

Host OS is CentOS 6.7.

7 thoughts on - Virtio Not Installing Correctly

  • Hi,

    I did many physical (Windows) to virtual (kvm) conversions before. The instructions in general are good here:
    http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Boot_from_virtio_block_device , so yes, you must add a dummy (“fake”) 2nd disk drive to the guest first, boot up the guest, install the virtio drivers to that 2nd virtual HDD and after that you can shutdown the guest, remove the dummy drive from the guest’s config and switch the original 1st disk’s setting from IDE to virtio. The whole reason for adding a 2nd dummy disk is the ability to install the virtio driver inside Windows while it is booted up from an IDE disk.

    I ran into one gotcha recently when I was converting an old Windows 7
    image to KVM though: the virtio drivers just did not work in Windows at first, because Windows could not verify the signatures of the virtio drivers and it was unwilling to use them. I had to fully update those old Windows 7 systems via the Windows Update service. After that Windows
    7 was able to recognize the signatures on the latest virtio drivers and started to use them. I believe that in an old Windows which was not updated for years, the root certificates are outdated and virtio drivers cannot be verified.

    I hope this helps.

    Z.

  • Zoltan Frombach writes:

    Yes, I understand the process and am following it. But XP is throwing a spanner in the works here by not completing the viostor installation process. Should I maybe try with latest rather than stable (.112 vs. .102)?

  • I’m not sure if that is going to make any difference. I use the latest myself ( .112 )

    Are you sure that the spinning wheel is not caused by the driver driver signature verification? Maybe try to upgrade the “root certificates” via Windows Updates first. Or try to disable driver signature checking temporarily:
    https://support.hidemyass.com/hc/en-us/articles/202723596-How-to-disable-Driver-Signing-check-on-Windows I definitely had this driver signature problem with an old Windows 7 a couple of weeks ago. In Windows 7, I didn’t get a forever spinning wheel, instead it popped up an error message.

    Zoltan

  • It’s XP, not 7. Driver installation commences (pages flying from folder to folder animation), and the machine had all the latest updates installed by the time XP went out of support.

    I think I will try the latest virtio. Pretty much stuck right now.

  • The root certificates were updated since XP went out of support and that may be the issue. I would look for any entries on how people have fixed this in other cases.

  • If that was the problem, driver installation wouldn’t even start. But it does, it just hangs towards the end.