Hi
Thanks for your guide on how to deploy Win10 to the DigitalOCean Droplets environment. The only problem we have is that we really need to be able to deploy from our own Win10 Enterpirse ISO and use our partnership key.
Using your guide as a starter, I have established a KVM virtual machine on an old box we have here and installed Win10-Ent on to that machine using a Raw disk fromat for the virtual hard disk.
After this was all working, I then GZipped up the raw disk file and uploaded it to the Digital Ocean Spaces storage.
At this point I fell back to following your guid and performed the wget/gunzip/dd step onwards.
I get a promising Windows logo displayed but after a few seconds there is the Smilly Blue Screen and an error code saying Inaccessible Boot Device.
Would you be able to point out what I'm missing? Did I get the wrong disk format? Is it simply missing the VirtuIO drivers?
Cheers
Dave
The technical details are;
Template: Custom
Vendor: Digital Ocean
Package: Droplet, 4GB Memory, 60GB Disk
Virtual
Location: Frankfurt
Welcome to WhatUpTime!
The error is more than likely caused by the lack of the VirtIO drivers. The disk format shouldn't have any bearing on the template creation process beyond your personal preference.
Hey
Thanks for the reply. I guess I need to workout how to get the VirtIO drivers installed before hand. Would you know the best way to do this?
I've been looking in to installing Redhat Virtualisation this afternoon but it looks like it could be a bit of a learning curve in itself. Assuming that is the same system used by DigitalOcean would suggest that it will require the same drivers.
Or maybe I can add the VirtIO devices to my Qemu-Kvm setup and then install the drivers locally before copying over again. I also remember there used to be some way of installing drivers without the hardware being present in Windows but it seems to be missing now.
Anyway thanks for the help so far, we are so close to getting a complete cross platform CI/CD system running on DigitalOcean, but yet still so far away 🙂
Cheers
Dave
Update
I was able to switch the disk and network (and everything else that has it) over to the VirtIO version of the device using the Virtual Machine Manager in my QEMU-KVM setup.
On installing Windows again I needed to point the installation to the VirtIO Storage Drivers before I could see the virtual hard drive and progress with the installer - promising that this was the cause of the Inaccessible Boot Device error.
I'll progress with uploading this disk image as a template and get DigitalOcean to switch over to the Recovery ISO again.
Fingers cross.
Good to hear you have it working!
Hi
I was able to complete the whole process and get our own Windows 10 Enterprise version running and activated with our license key. Very Good News.
The key part for us was going through the QEMU-KVM virtual machine hardware settings before carrying on with the installation and changing all the devices types that provided a VirtIO type option.
After this we also needed the VirtIO drivers downloaded from Fedora
https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/stable-virtio/virtio-win.iso
You need the VirtIO Storage driver early in the installation otherwise you can't find the virtual hard disk to install the OS on. We also installed the other VirtIO drivers once the OS was operational and resolved all the driver issues in Device Manager before proceeding.
We used the Raw disk format and then just gzipped it up after shutting down the VM
gzip -c win-10-ent-disk.raw > win-10-ent-disk.raw.gz
We copied this over to our s3 storage space and then followed the excellent whatuptime.com guide on how to proceed.
I have to say the donation was very worthwhile and hopefully you can find the time to create a template creation guide with the same quality. Until then maybe others can pick enough out from this post.
Cheers
Dave
Thank you very much for sharing!