Windows 81 Qcow2 Install �EXTENDED RELEASE】

: Set this to VirtIO . This offers the best performance but requires the driver disk during installation. NIC (Network) : Set the Device Model to virtio-net .

After this operation, the .qcow2 file will only occupy space for the actual data blocks, not the entire provisioned disk size.

Once Windows 8.1 boots:

The challenge: Windows setup cannot see the QCOW2 disk if it expects IDE/SATA but we use virtio-block. The workaround:

-cpu host,hv_relaxed,hv_spinlocks=0x1fff,hv_vapic,hv_time windows 81 qcow2 install

In this command, -f qcow2 specifies the disk image format, win81.qcow2 is the name of the image file, and 40G sets the maximum size of the virtual hard disk. It is generally recommended to allocate at least 40GB for a usable Windows system.

For QCOW2 images on SSDs, enable the discard option to pass TRIM commands from the guest to the host. This frees up space in the QCOW2 file when files are deleted in Windows, keeping the image file size efficient: : Set this to VirtIO

: Start the virtual machine and boot from the Windows 8.1 ISO.