Win7 does not recognize Virtio 0.1.141 correclty?!

[richinbg]

Hello!
I am trying to install a new Windows 7 guest and I read the Wiki page about best pratice.
So I did create a VirtIO Drive and then downloaded latest drivers from Red Had, loading them during installation.
They get displayed - I click "next" and then I get:
"No new devices could be found. Make sure that the driver files are correct and located on the driver installation media."

I am using a Win7 Enterprise 64 Bit ISO including SP1. Tried already two different ISOs but both show the same error...

I am using latest Proxmox 5.1-41. Any ideas, please? Thanks!

 

[tom]

Corrupted Windows ISO or VirtIO ISO?

Or you did not select the right folder for your drivers?

See also:
https://www.proxmox.com/en/training/video-tutorials/item/install-windows-2016-server-on-proxmox-ve

The tutorial is for win2016 but the process is totally similar for Win7 or Win10.

 

[richinbg]

Did try two different Windows ISOs. And two different driver ISOs files (did redownload the files etc.)
Followed also a video tutorial but still get the same error message - that's why I was starting the thread

So tried it again - no luck!

 

[tom]

1. Did you verify the checksums of your ISO after you uploaded the ISO to your Proxmox VE host?

And post your:
2. pveversion -v
3. qm config VMID (of your windows VM)
4. What physical hardware do you have?

 

[richinbg]

Hello,
I did work around it now - made a win7 vm on VMware and then migrated that to proxmox.
That should work for now at least. If I come again in the situation that i need to install win i will give it a try again and provide information for it.

Thanks for your quick replies! Awesome!

 

[Gustavo Neves]

Hi there!
I also had problems to install Win7 with the virtIO drivers (both virtIO block and SCSI).

My workaround was a bit easier.
Just install Windows 7 with an IDE (or SATA) disk.
Turn the VM off, attach a disk with the type you want to use so we can force windows to install its drivers.
These disks can be of any size (eg 2GB).

I actually attached a SCSI disk and a VirtIO Block disk to it as well as the virtIO drivers CD.
Just so I could load all the drivers on Windows.

Now we boot the VM with everything attached to it and open Device Manager.
If you used the virtIO network card as well, you will see more than one device with an exclamation mark on it.

For each device with an exclamation mark, tell it to look for drivers on the root of the virtIO CD and that should be enough for it to be installed.
Here I had several devices (serial, ethernet, SCSI controller, Balloon).

The Proxmox help says that SCSI virtIO superseeded the VirtIO block in features, so that is what I am using.

After all the drivers are installed, turn off the VM again.
Now detach and remove the small disks we just added for drivers (doing this first will avoid getting higher disk numbers on SCSI as well as avoid confusion when deleting disks). Care not to delete your system disk!

Then we detach the system Disk (but do NOT remove it).
Now double-click on the detached disk and change it to:
SCSI / Cache Write back / IO Thread (will change card to VirtIO SCSI Single).

Then we boot windows again and it should work this time (may ask for an additional reboot).

All other versions of windows I tried installed fine with the VirtIO drivers, just Win7 had problems.
I am using the latest beta drivers virtio-win-0.1.149, but I tried pretty much all versions of VirtIO and none were reconised on Windows 7 x64.

Funny thing is that the 32bit drivers do get reconised even on 64 bit systems (they do not work though).
Also funny that the same driver works after Windows is installed.

You may still want to install the Baloon service and the Guest service as well.
Guest service has an installer, but the Balloon service is just a folder to be copied to C:\Program Files and renamed. Then you open cmd, go to the folder and run `blnsvr.exe -i` to register the service.

Hope this helps!

Here are the screenshots of how to add the drivers after


Gus

 

[tristank]

As of right now it is still not possible to install WIndows 7 on a VirtIO Block device because the drivers (virtio-win 0.1.215) will not be recognized. You will also have to make sure to uncheck "pre-enroll-keys" or to disable secure boot in the guests uefi (hit F2 during boot to get into the uefi) because otherwise the Windows 7 iso will not be bootable (access denied error).