Move qcow2 image to physical hard drive

Question

I have a qcow2 image that I use to boot an installation of linux using QEMU; I would like to place the contents of that image directly onto a physical hard drive so that I can boot to that linux installation directly from my desktop. I would like to do something like dd if=my-qcow2.img of=/dev/sdb. However, this will clearly not work since qcow2 does not store the contents of the virtual disk in logical order within the qcow2 file. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

QEMU comes with the qemu-img program to convert between image formats.

qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O raw my-qcow2.img /dev/sdb