Installing VirtIO drivers on Win7

Question

Context: I am attempting to convince a 64bit Win7 VirtualBox image to run under OpenStack, and Windows isn't my usual platform. Installing the Virtio drivers hasn't been going well. Thus far, what has gotten closest to working is running

pnputil -a f:\WIN7\X86\*.inf

for the RHEL drivers. Shutting down the virtual host, I can then change the network adapter type to "Paravirtualized network (virtio-net)" in the settings. Bringing it back up, the "Ethernet Controller" entry in the Device Manager doesn't have a driver associated, and using the Gui to "Update Driver Settings" doesn't find anything it likes when I point it to the above directory. I tried using

devcon install f:\WIN7\NETKVM.INF "PCI\VEN_1AF4&DEV_1000&SUBSYS_00011AF&REV_00", 

with the result being a terse "devcon failed." I get the same result with the other hardware IDs listed in the ethernet controller properties.

I'm not sure what else to try. Other questions here and elsewhere seem to indicate that the devcon bit above worked for them.

Solution

You tried to install the 32-bit drivers on 64-bit Windows.

The 64-bit drivers can be found on the virtio CD image in the \win7\amd64 folder.

Comments

[Michael Hampton]

Is it a 32-bit installation of Windows?!

[jal]

No, 64. Edited question to specify.

[Michael Hampton]

But you tried to install the 32-bit drivers! Look in the \win7\amd64 folder for the 64-bit drivers.

[jal]

Doh! That was it. I am an idiot. I think I was mentally translating amd64 to ia64. Thank you, Michael.

[Michael Hampton]

Itanium was a market failure, and so Intel copied AMD's 64-bit architecture. Thus the name.