Thank you for your fast reply.
I hope you paid attention to the user manuals dire warnings about the dangers of this feature.
Indeed this is the reason why I am not proceeding with my usual trial-and-error approach. I have an UEFI/GPT system, which dual boots Windows and Arch Linux. From Windows as host I would like to boot the Arch Linux partition as a guest.
Some points are clear, some still require to me a bit of extra details. Specifically:
Partitions are a guest OS concept, not a function of the disk drive.
Also docs say:
While the guest will be able to see all partitions that exist on the physical disk, access will be filtered in that reading from partitions for which no access is allowed the partitions will only yield zeroes, and all writes to them are ignored.
It is not absolutely clear to me what happen to the non-partition areas (say MBRs, MBR gaps used by some boot loaders) when no `-mbr` option is given. I try to explain myself with an example.
Let us assume that I create a virtual drive from a raw partition (no `-mbr` option) and I attach it to a VM together with a live Linux ISO (eg Arch Linux ISO).
I boot the ISO. Assume that `/dev/sda` is the virtual drive image and I execute a canonical:
Code: Select all
# dd if=/dev/sda of=mbr.bin bs=512 count=1
Do I get some actual data here? And if so, where do these data come from.
Put it another way, if I write:
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# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
what am I zeroing (if any)?
If the guest OS is UEFI compatible (eg Arch Linux), are the effects of `dd`, or similar tools, impacted by the fact that the VM is set with or without "Enable EFI" checked.