Using qemu on Windows (Basics)

Have you ever felt an urge to use Linux in your office but you are not allowed t
o install it without permission. Additionally you are not allowed the partition
the Hard Disk. What could be a solution? Very simple, get a Virtual Machine. Now
again a new problem comes up- Virtualizing softwares are quite big and take for
example VMWare are too big itself to be handled and cant be kept hidden on your
computer.
This is my experience what I did when faced these problems. I downloaded qemu fo
r Windows and also the ISO of the Linux I wanted to use. In my case it was Xubun
tu as I wanted a lightweight distro. First of all you dont need to install qemu
at all, just unzip it and keep it in any folder of you choice. Neither do you ha
ve to add any Product key or anythin of the sort. Here it the step by step proce
edure what needs to be done to make a Virtual copy of Linux running on yor syste
m.
1. Get a copy of the ISO of your Operating System
I wanted to install Linux Xubuntu and download a copy of it from the main websit
e. You can get any OS, doesnt need to be Xubuntu. It can be OpenSolaris, OpenBSD
, FreeBSD or Windows itself
2. Create a virtual Hard Disk
This step is useful only if you want to install the OS, if you intend just to ru
n LIVE without installing, you can skip this stage.
qemu-img.exe create filename 4000M
Where filename is the name of the file you are intending to use as a Hard Disk a
nd 4000M means the size of the file is 4000MB. To create files of size more than
4GB you need to be on NTFS Filesystem as older ones cant handle such large file
s.
3. Start the OS in Live Mode
In this case you dont need to have a Hard Disk, just an ISO required. Boot from
it using the command
qemu.exe -cdrom isoimage.iso -boot d
In this case isoimage.iso is the file which contains the ISO and is to tell that
you want to boot from CD. In this case you have chosen to make CDROM as an ISO.
4. Install the OS on the Disk you created
In this you need to have the Disc created along with the ISO, use this command
qemu.exe -cdrom isoimage.iso -hda filename -boot d
The above command means that you chosen ISO as the CDROM, filename as First Hard
Disk (hda) and you wanted to boot from CDROM ( -boot d )
Install from the ISO, when it is complete, just exit from qemu.
5. Starting an installed OS
This case is when you have installed from the ISO and want to use it regularly.
In this case just issue the command
qemu.exe -hda filename -boot c
Here -boot c tells to boot from the first Hard Disk, you dont need -cdrom option
as you have already installed the OS. You can have more than one hard disk, by

specifying the -hdb ,-hdc and -hdd option, but you can only boot from -hda.
Tips:
I was not able to connect to network even after specifying a lots of options
. If your network doesnt work and you want to have some files on the guest OS, t
hen download it on host OS, make an ISO from all those files using some tool lik
e MagicISO. Then before starting the Virtual Machine, specify this ISO in the -c
drom options but use -boot c option itself to boot from the hard disk. Now when
you are inside the OS, just mount the ISO using the command
mount /dev/scd0 /media/cdrom
Dont ever close the running Host OS using the close button of available in w
indows. Maybe you might not understand why at the first glance, but you can corr
upt your data or installation. Dont even try to open two instances of the Guest
OS using the command two times using the same Hard Disk file. You can badly scre
w up your installation.
-boot option can be used to control the boot priority as you did in BIOS set
tings. a means floppy drive, c means Hard Disk and d means CD Drive.
Since you can have more than one Hard Disk you may be tempted to use the Har
d Disk images in any order you want. This is highly unrecommended because MBR is
only on the first Hard Disk. If you have Second Hard Disk on hdb when installin
g, swapping them too may lead to unbootable state as the Second Hard Disk doesnt
have a MBR.
You can even start the Guest OS in full screen mode using the -full-screen o
ption
Lastly, qemu can even access your Host OSs hardware itself. You can install L
inux/OpenSolaris etc on the physical partitons itself. You can directly access t
he physical CD Drive inside the Guest OS. All these would be covered in the next
Tutorial.