I am looking for a howto on qemu, I read the docs on the site thuroughly and thaught I understood it fine, until I tried to use it. I was able to create a raw image of 1gb, now I want to load it and have it boot the windows2k install cd, I have tried several commands that I derived from reading docs, but I cannot get past the usage information in most of them.

I am not askign for someone to write a tutorial here and now, but if anyone can point me to a howto or some better docs that would be great, or if I have a typeo or something in an otherwise correct command please inform me.

these are the commands I tried:
created image:
Tried to execute, none of these worked

Don't use qemu-i386... you must use the qemu command.

As you emerged qemu, at the end there is the comment about it. You need to put 'softmmu' in your useflags end re-emerge qemu.

Then you do :

or something similar. This boots your cd with testimage as your harddrive hda.

i've been playing with qemu for several days now, so i'm gonna post some stuff.
you can boot almost anything with that emulator.
-boot then a c or d. a for floppy, c for hard drive, and d for cdrom.
then whatever you set for the cdrom will boot.
qemu -boot d -cdrom /dev/cdrom or some iso image will be fine.
just an hour ago i booted a cdrom with some dos utilities on it because i wanted to make my windows 2000 image smaller. I ran into a problem with win2000 installing in that it was make gig's of security logs and taking up all the space. I don't know why, but i was able to delete them all after getting done with the install. i used norton's ghost 6 to copy the hard drive image i had been using to a new one i just made.
qemu -boot d -cdrom /dev/scd0 -hda 2000.img -hdb 2001.img
that got me to boot from the cdrom, and and i had the two drives there for ghost. you can also load up a regular hard drive too. -hdc /dev/hdi added to the command line let me add a hard drive on as the third hard drive too. if i put it at -hda i could boot from it.
I've found qemu to be wonderfully versatile, but i haven't been able to get the samba working. that's why i experimented with hooking up another hard drive when i couldn't get samba to work. i could ping the 10.0.2.2 adress or whatever it was, but the share i tried to use wouldn't show up.
I installed gordian knot in 2000 under qemu and let it make a few divx movies, and it only took about 1.75 times as long as it would have under plain 2000.
i can't think of anything else right now and i've got dogs barking and stuff. I'll have to try later.


One thing i really enjoy doing is using control-z on the terminal i started the qemu session in. It's fun suspending the whole windows session, then restarting with fg. It's the most control I've ever had over windows.