I have a Windows 11 23H2 VM with a SATA boot disk running on virtmanager (KVM/Qemu) on Fedora 39 that I want to convert to a virtio disk.
- in windows install virtio guest tools (download)
- create cd drive and attach virtio iso (download)
- shutdown vm
- in virtmanager preferences, enable
xml editing - in the vm disk settings, go to the
xmltab, backup the existing xml and change it:
old:
<disk type="file" device="disk">
<driver name="qemu" type="qcow2" discard="unmap"/>
<source file="/var/lib/libvirt/images/win11_01.qcow2"/>
<target dev="sda" bus="sata"/>
<address type="drive" controller="0" bus="0" target="0" unit="0"/>
</disk>new:
<disk type="file" device="disk">
<driver name="qemu" type="qcow2" discard="unmap"/>
<source file="/var/lib/libvirt/images/win11_01.qcow2"/>
<target dev="vda" bus="virtio"/>upon saving, virtmanager will auto-complete this to something like:
<disk type="file" device="disk">
<driver name="qemu" type="qcow2" discard="unmap"/>
<source file="/var/lib/libvirt/images/win11_01.qcow2" index="2"/>
<backingStore/>
<target dev="vda" bus="virtio"/>
<alias name="virtio-disk0"/>
<address type="pci" domain="0x0000" bus="0x05" slot="0x00" function="0x0"/>
</disk>- start disk. windows will boot into a bluescreen, reboot automatically and boot into the recovery menu
- in the recovery menu, open a
cmdshell - navigate to the cd drive where the virtio iso is mounted (i.e.
d:and load the driver)
cd /d d:\viostor\w11\amd64
drvload.exe viostor.inf- now the windows disk should be accessible as
c:\(or a different drive letter) - inject the driver to the windows disk:
dism.exe /image:c:\ /add-driver /driver:viostor.inf