Getting windows virtio mounted/installed for KVM

There might be an easy answer to this. I have exhausted my search on google for a solution. Here's my problem.

I need to get Windows working on a KVM vps with virtualizor CP. As I get into windows installation in VNC, there's the mandatory driver installation requirement, as HDD is in virtio. There seems to be 2 solutions:

  1. Mount the virtio iso in the CD drive by unmounting Windows ISO and proceed with driver installation.
  2. Create a secondary CD drive and mount the virtio iso there.

Well, 1st step never seems to work. If I unload the Windows iso and load the virtio iso, it never reflects back in the VNC.

Second step I have yet to be successfull. I try to create a second IDE CD ROM drive via virt-manager but the virtio (virtio-win-0.1-30.iso) iso is never listed in there, whereas i specially placed it in /var/lib/libvirt/images folder.

Any suggestions on where I screwed up?


The normal way to do this installation is:

  1. Create the VM with a virtualized IDE disk, not a virtio disk.

    Before running the installation, choose to customize the hardware, and attach a second virtual hard drive which does use virtio.

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    This hard drive need only be a temporary drive; it could be a tiny 1GB blank something or other.

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  2. Install Windows. (I presume you need no help with this.)

  3. Attach the ISO image containing the virtio drivers.

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  4. You'll be notified by popup of hardware for which drivers failed to install. Click on it, or enter Device Manager yourself.

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  5. Right click on SCSI Controller, and choose Update Device Driver. Choose to Browse my computer for driver software.

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  6. Click Browse, then navigate to the \win7\amd64 folder on the virtual CD, and then click OK. Click Next.

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  7. The Red Hat VirtIO SCSI controller driver will be detected. Install it.

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  8. Shut down the VM.

  9. Detach the second virtual hard drive. Optionally, delete it. It was temporary, after all.

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  10. Select the first virtual IDE hard drive, expand Advanced options, change the Disk bus to Virtio, then click Apply.

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  11. Start the VM.

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If something goes wrong here, run Startup Repair using these instructions.

And at this point, you can run sysprep /generalize and use the result as a VM template.