Migrate VM to laptop with QEMU/KVM

[karypid]

Hello,

I am a hobbyist using Proxmox on my main system. My desktop is a VM with GPU passthrough. I also have other VMs and one of them is a small (ram/disk) Windows 11 machine.

I need to transfer this machine to my laptop which runs Fedora and only has VirtManager. To that end, I followed these instructions and then imported the VM into Virt Manager.

The good news: it seems to have worked. I can boot the VM on my laptop now and it shows me the login screen.

The bad news: As soon as I login I get a black screen.

The thing is, this seems to be some graphics issue:

• The VM is running fine. If I press shutdown in Virt Manager it invokes an order shutdown.
• I entered Windows Repair (apparently you do this using "force off" !! twice !! during boot) and selected the good old SAFE MODE I was able to log in and see the Windows desktop (run the file manager, etc) so it seems like indeed this is a graphics issue!
  • I wanted to uninstall the QEMU guest additions but was unable to (it says the installer is unavailable)
• I then restarted into Windows Repair and selected "Low resolution" mode, hoping that might fix but I logged into a blank screen again...

I know this is not strictly a Proxmox thing, but has anyone successfully migrated a Win11 VM to a regular Linux QEMU/KVM host? I can start over (the VM is still in Proxmox) and follow some other set of instructions.

Or if you have any suggestions on fixing the VM on the Fedora side?

 

[dakralex]

Have you already resolved the issue? If not, have you also configured GPU passthrough for the Windows machine? How is the Windows machine configured (e.g. qm config <windows-vmid>? Windows VMs are sometimes very sensitive to changes in hardware and virtualization configuration, so it'd be best to recreate the VM configuration as close as possible and use the same QEMU version (should be specified in the VM config, e.g. meta: creation-qemu=9.0.2). Also, have you updated the VirtI/O and Qemu guest additions to the latest version?

 

[karypid]

So, luckily I had remote desktop enabled, therefore I was able to RDP into the VM running on my laptop.

Once logged in, I reinstalled the full VirtIO driver suite from the ISO. This ended up fixing the problem and I was able to log in from the virt-manager UI after rebooting.