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I've been looking through the options of the QEMU binary, and I can't work this one out: Is it possible to make a new KVM machine with an existing hard drive image with an OS (XP Pro in this case) already installed?

I have seen a guide online to turn my VirtualBox XP Pro hard drive (.vdi) into a qemu image (which I have done) but I can't seem to make a new KVM using this existing hard drive?

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virt-install ... --disk [path to your existing image] --import ...

--import
Skip the OS installation process, and build a guest around an existing disk image. The device used for booting is the first device specified via "--disk" or "--file".

--disk [path]
path - A path to some storage media to use, existing or not. Existing media can be a file or block device. Specifying a non-existent path implies attempting to create the new storage, and will require specifyng a ’size’ value.

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  • Ah, the import option, I didnt find this. Thanks so much :D
    – jwbensley
    Dec 12, 2011 at 13:09
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qemu-img command can convert any img format.

You can convert .vdi image to raw image. All hypervisors support raw image format. Then you can convert raw image to qed/qcow2 format to save image size.

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    qemu-img command support vdi format.
    – Edward Shen
    Aug 13, 2013 at 10:13
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    qemu can directly run vdi format disk.
    – Edward Shen
    Aug 14, 2013 at 1:40

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