Your QCOW2 disk will now appear in the list. Select the unallocated space and click to proceed with the core file installation. Step 5: Post-Installation Driver Configuration
Choose "Local install media" and select your Windows 8.1 ISO.
Ultimate Guide to Installing Windows 8.1 from a QCOW2 Image Using a pre-configured QCOW2 (QEMU Copy-on-Write) image is the fastest way to deploy Windows 8.1 in a virtualised environment. Whether you are using Proxmox VE, KVM/QEMU on Ubuntu, or Unraid, skipping the tedious OS installation wizard saves massive amounts of time.
– Get the official Windows 8.1 ISO from Microsoft.
Minimum 20 GB of storage allocated within the storage pool. windows 81 qcow2 install
There are two legitimate routes:
-drive file=virtio-win.iso,media=cdrom : Mounts the driver disk as a secondary CD-ROM.
qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 source.raw destination.qcow2
Windows 8.1’s "Metro" interface consumes significant resources. In a virtual environment with no 3D acceleration (unless GPU passthrough is configured), this UI is sluggish. Your QCOW2 disk will now appear in the list
Change the Network Interface card (NIC) model type to .
This command creates a QCOW2-formatted image named win81.qcow2 with a size of 40 gigabytes. You can adjust the size based on your needs—20 GB is the absolute minimum, but 40 GB or more is strongly recommended for users who plan to install additional programs. The beauty of QCOW2 is that the file will initially use only a small amount of actual disk space, growing dynamically as data is written.
Then use qm importdisk to import it into Proxmox.
: If using Virt-Manager , select "Customize configuration before install". Storage : Change the Disk Bus from SATA/IDE to VirtIO . Network : Set the Device Model to virtio . Ultimate Guide to Installing Windows 8
When creating your QCOW2 image, use preallocation to improve performance:
Once QEMU launches, you'll see the Windows installer. Follow these steps:
qemu-img command-line utility and optionally virt-manager for a graphical interface. Guest Software Packages