Re: Converting PV to HVM - boot methods

Stephen Borrill <[email protected]> Thu, 24 Apr 2025 15:37:06 +0100 (BST)
Newsgroups gmane.os.netbsd.ports.i386
Message-ID <Pine.NEB.4.64.2504241531180.1680@ugly>
On Thu, 24 Apr 2025, Mouse wrote:
>> I have a (large) number of PV Xen VMs.  [...booting trouble...]
>
>> My current best fix is to add a 2nd tiny (16MB) virtual disk with GPT
>> partitioning and a single MSDOS EFI partition containing [booter]
>
>> This all works fine, but I'm interested in others' alternatives
>> suggestions.
>
> You wrote of not having space at the beginning of the disk.  Why not
> just fix that?  Move everything over by enough space to add your
> partitioning?  Or, ultimately equivalently, create a new (virtual)
> disk, partition it, and copy the data from your current partition to
> the new disk's partition?

Yes, those were my first ideas, but with my method the downtime on these 
production machines is literally the time it takes to reboot.

Of course, on all future machines I will do the job properly, but back 
in the day when I was auto-generating .xva files for importing 
into XenServer, there weren't as many options.

-- 
Stephen