Default emulated disk in Qubes 4.0 HVM is not supported by Windows 7 installer

[marmarek]

Qubes OS version (e.g., R3.2): R4.0

Expected behavior:

Windows installer allow to install the system.

Actual behavior:

Windows installer complains: "No drives were found".

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

Launch Windows 7 installation (currently tricky because of #2951).

[marmarek]

PR for #2951 created, so working on this issue is easier now.

From what I see, Windows 7 do not support the SCSI controller emulated by qemu option -drive if=scsi,.... But it does support standard IDE and AHCI (-device ahci,id=ahci0 -drive if=none,id=ahcidisk-0,... -device ide-hd,bus=ahci0.0,drive=ahcidisk-0). Libxl do support creating AHCI disks (VM-wide switch: b_info->u.hvm.hdtype = LIBXL_HDTYPE_AHCI), but qemu does not support AHCI read-only disks (as well as IDE). For IDE drives in qemu, read-only property is tied up to being CDROM (ide_dev_initfn function in hw/ide/qdev.c).
I see those options:

• look how it worked in Qubes 3.2 with qemu-xen-traditional (maybe read-only disks weren't supported there either?)
• try some other device supported by qemu (maybe another SCSI controller?),
• create IDE/AHCI device for read-write devices, and SCSI for read-only ones (those will be unavailable to Windows...),
• look how hard would be adding read-only support to AHCI emulation

@HW42 do you have idea for reasonable solution here?

[HW42]

I would try another scsi controller. I already looked at the problem a while back and there are scsi contollers supported by Windows out of the box (I had tested some Win 7 Pro and Win 10 Pro installers). IIRC 'mptsas1068' and 'megasas' are supported by windows. I did not switched to those because Linux and Freebsd had problems with the emulated controller. But maybe this is already fixed. I/We have to retry.

[qubesos-bot]

Automated announcement from builder-github

The package xen_4.8.2-4+deb8u1 has been pushed to the r4.0 testing repository for the Debian jessie template.
To test this update, first enable the testing repository in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/qubes-*.list by uncommenting the line containing jessie-testing, then use the standard update command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Changes included in this update

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Automated announcement from builder-github

The package xen_4.8.2-4+deb9u1 has been pushed to the r4.0 testing repository for the Debian stretch template.
To test this update, first enable the testing repository in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/qubes-*.list by uncommenting the line containing stretch-testing, then use the standard update command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Changes included in this update

[qubesos-bot]

Automated announcement from builder-github

The package python2-xen-4.8.2-4.fc25 has been pushed to the r4.0 testing repository for dom0.
To test this update, please install it with the following command:

sudo qubes-dom0-update --enablerepo=qubes-dom0-current-testing

Changes included in this update

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Automated announcement from builder-github

The package python2-xen-4.8.2-4.fc24 has been pushed to the r4.0 testing repository for the Fedora fc24 template.
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Changes included in this update

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The package python2-xen-4.8.2-4.fc25 has been pushed to the r4.0 testing repository for the Fedora fc25 template.
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The package python2-xen-4.8.2-11.fc25 has been pushed to the r4.0 stable repository for dom0.
To install this update, please use the standard update command:

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Or update dom0 via Qubes Manager.

Changes included in this update

[qubesos-bot]

Automated announcement from builder-github

The package xen_2001:4.8.2-11+deb8u1 has been pushed to the r4.0 stable repository for the Debian jessie template.
To install this update, please use the standard update command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Changes included in this update

[qubesos-bot]

Automated announcement from builder-github

The package xen_2001:4.8.2-11+deb9u1 has been pushed to the r4.0 stable repository for the Debian stretch template.
To install this update, please use the standard update command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Changes included in this update

[qubesos-bot]

Automated announcement from builder-github

The package python2-xen-4.8.2-11.fc24 has been pushed to the r4.0 stable repository for the Fedora fc24 template.
To install this update, please use the standard update command:

sudo yum update

Changes included in this update

[qubesos-bot]

Automated announcement from builder-github

The package python2-xen-4.8.2-11.fc25 has been pushed to the r4.0 stable repository for the Fedora fc25 template.
To install this update, please use the standard update command:

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Changes included in this update