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Topic: Boot/qemu writable FS on USB< Next Oldest | Next Newest >
pcause Offline





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Posted: June 26 2005,18:29 QUOTE
QEMU can't access raw devices, and it doesn't let you mount Windows drives.  It needs a file to use as the virtual hard disk.  To use the USB drive, what you can do is use the qemu-img program (not part of DSL's embedded, unfortunatley) and create a file on the USB drive.  Then edit the dsl-windows.bat file and add -hdx=x:\filename - where hdx could be hdd hde, etc and c:\filename is the path of the file you created using qemu-ing.  Now when you start DSL, you can use fdisk hdx to create partitions on the file and then use mkfx -t ext2 tpo create a file system.
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cbagger01 Offline





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Posted: June 27 2005,04:42 QUOTE
I think he meant

mkfs -t ext2 /dev/hdx

to create a filesystem for partition hdx
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plenTpak
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Posted: July 01 2005,02:03 QUOTE
I just experimented this today on Windows 2000 and was looking for more information. I was able to mount and read/write to a drive using "qemu -hda \\.\d:" (well, along with all the other arguments and such... it may also work in linux with -hda /dev/hd1 or similar...).

I was able to install Windows XP on it, restart the drive, and boot up Windows XP. However, it seems to (and I'm guessing here) treat the drive as an img file, since when I try to view the drive in Windows Explorer, the drive shows as unpartitioned.

So it seems like it would be possible to modify qemu to write to the drive normally, if someone who knew how to do it wanted to work on it... this feature might even be in development (this was the first site I stumbled across, so I haven't researched it too thoroughly yet...).

Tried doing the same thing in dsl (since this is a dsl forum) but I'm not familiar with linux, so I couldn't figure out how to mount the drive from inside qemu/dsl...
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plenTpak
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Posted: July 01 2005,02:17 QUOTE
Oh yeah, also, trying to boot from an existing drive (like running "qemu -hda \\.\c:" in Windows) causes qemu to stop responding (but continue using cpu cycles). I'm guessing qemu doesn't know what kind of file system it's reading, so if someone wanted to develop direct disk access from qemu, they'd need to handle that.

Barring that, it'd be nice if we could mount the .img files as a virtual drive, or edit them as if they were .isos or .zips.....
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mstrhelix Offline





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Posted: July 29 2005,00:30 QUOTE
It seems very strange that when i chose to compile Qemu for winXP the packages i downloaded to install it ,MinGW . After installing it the program drops me into a shell and in windows i can place files in a certain directory and when i run the program it drops a shell and sees the new files........
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17 replies since Feb. 28 2005,17:02 < Next Oldest | Next Newest >

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