I have qemu installed with my Knoppix 4 machine, and I have been trying to get ether win XP or win 2k to work inside it. Both do the same thing.

During the install, I get a BSOD inside qemu saying that "An attempt was made to write to read-only memory" the screen I am looking at the moment clains that ntfs.sys is to blame.

I think that qemu is providing memory to the host, indicating that it is read/write but the host then trys to write to it and is unable to. I've been using the command
I'm using the -m switch to reduce the memory availble to the host in attempt to solve the problem, but so far it hasn't helped.

Thanks for any advice in advance.

The '-m' option is to tell qemu how much ram it should tell the guest OS it has. If i put '-m 256' then the guest OS will use 256MB of RAM. You can put as much or as little as you like providing it is enough for the guest OS to run. And that the host has enough to provide it.

Have you actually created the disk image for the guest to install to. When you start qemu it does not have any harddrives, it only has the controllers. You need to tell it what file on your real harddrive it is to use for its fake harddrive. When you specify 'winxp.img' this should be a file on your real harddrive. There are a number of ways to make these files.

I have an image file, and I've tryed it with several diferent formats, including cow, qcow and raw. I was using the -m switch to decrease the amount of memory used (from the defualt of 128) to see if this would reduce the occurances of the segfualts. I have also upgraded to qemu 8.2 to use the -win2k-hack switch which appears to not have made a blind bit of diference. I have since discovered that if I run as root this particular problem just goes away, although now qemu will freze the whole system (I can't even use ctrl+alt+F# to get to a vurtual terminal) no mater what OS I try to use with it, ot even DOS 6.0.
Does anyone know what could be causing this?

I'm begininig to wonder if this is a hardware failure, qemu works fine on my work HP P4 dual core 1.6 laptop when running knoppix 4.0 from the CD and I made a disk image of a win98 machine while using it. I can't get that far using my desktop wich is an AMD Athlon 950 (both using the HD install of Knoppix 4.0 and running it from the CD) it just keeps on freezing. I can use the disk image that I made on the laptop for about 10 mins before it goes, aththough if I'm not running KDE (I was trying fluxbox to get some extra performance out of it) I can get to a vurtual terninal, kill X and then restart it.

I'm baffled.