Windows 8.1 install under KVM

What do you see when you access the "Graphical Console" page for the VM?

Wow, that's odd. What if you click the button to send a ctrl-alt-delete to the VM? Does it do anything?

When you created the VM, did you change "Enable high resolution graphics?" to "Yes" ? That might been needed for the Windows installer to appear properly.

Another thing to check is that on the VM creation form you should disable virtIO for disk and network drivers.

I'm out of ideas here, sorry - Cloudmin depends on KVM to do the actual virtualization, and there may be some incompatibility with Windows 8.1 that is out of our control. You may want to look into whether anyone has gotten this working with a manually created KVM instance.

You may be better off asking Windows experts about this..

I found an installation video, for Windows 8.1 guest on Ubuntu 14.04...

He set the drivers to virtio, mount a CD image to the windows guest KVM containing special guest virtio drivers, then boot and install.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMXctyhcrfs

Did he add any other special KVM settings or flags?

The guy in the video did the following non-default settings to get windows 8.1 enterprise eval (90 days) install to work right.

1. set networking interface card to use virtio.
2. set disk storage bus to use virtio.
3. add a second cd drive.
4. mount the ISO cd image for "linux kvm windows virtio para virtualized drivers iso" (search engine) on that second cd drive.

Boot the system and it installs windows from cd 1.

At some point during the install, windows 8.1 will fail to find the hard disk. This is expected. it's the same as installing windows to a system with a non standard SCSI or raid disk controller.

This is when you specify cd 2, and load all 3 drivers from cd.

Installation continues from there smoothly and should complete without issue.

Best to use a Remote Desktop client to access the desktop. VNC is not as good quality.

It should be possible to do the same in Cloudmin - on the VM creation page you can select virtIO for the network interface and disk drives, and attach a CD image. It seems like the issue you saw is related to the graphics driver rather than the disk..

I'd like to test this out on my own system. Where did you get the Windows 8.1 CD image from?

The Windows 8.1 Enterprise Eval 90 day CD image is available to download from here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/evalcenter/hh699156.aspx

The Virtio drivers CD

http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/WindowsGuestDrivers/Download_Drivers

"If your distribution does not provide binary drivers for Windows, you can use the package from the Fedora Project. These drivers are digitally signed, and will work on 64-bit versions of Windows: "

Latest VirtIO drivers for Window CD image, from the Fedora project. http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/

Latest iso as of today is this: http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/virtio-win-0.1-94...

So I downloaded that ISO, and created an empty VM in Cloudmin with it as the CD image ... and it worked fine!

This was on a CentOS 7 host system though, with KVM 1.5.3.

That's good news for Centos 7. U ran with or without the virtio drivers? Debian 7 wheezy has kvm 1.1.2, a bit older than your 1.5.3. Maybe you could try it again on debian 7 and see if that reproduces his bug?

I tried with the default settings for an empty VM, which have virtio disabled for network and disk.

I don't have a Debian 7 test system handy, but it seems very likely that an older version of KVM cannot run a new version of Windows.

You're right... Debian 7 (wheezy) comes with a version of KVM and libvirt (qemu-kvm 1.1.2+dfsg-6 and libvirt0 0.9.12-11+deb7u4.) that cannot run a Windows 8 or 8.1 guest virtual machine.

Solution 1, is to install a newer version of KVM ( qemu-kvm-devel-1.1.92 3.7.0-rc2 ) from wheezy-backports repository, which works fine with WIndows 8 and 8.1 guests.

Solution 2, just install Windows 10 Technical Preview for Enterprise - it's compatible with qemu-kvm-1.1.2 that comes with Debian 7 wheezy.

Full qemu-KVM compatibility chart for all Host and Guest operating systems.

http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Guest_Support_Status

Read more in this bug report thread at debian bugs!

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=736235

"Bug#736235: Cannot run Windows 8+ guests under KVM"

Windows 10 is the best operating system and i suggest you to install t from here https://fixconnectionsbluetoothaudiodeviceswirelessdisplayswindows10.net and get the best option to solve the task.