Re: [Qemu-devel] qemu crashes at boot start

[Robin Pfeifer <bitpicker@compuserve.de>]

This has been discussed as 'qemu problem (you might be my last resort)', 
but the new topic line is probably a little more informative. I'd like 
to subsume the error once more, maybe someone has an idea who ignored 
the less-informative previous title.

I am trying to boot live CDs or the freedos.img as available on the qemu 
homepage. It used to work perfectly a couple of months ago, and back 
then I aliassed the command

livecd='qemu -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d -snapshot'

When I added more RAM about a month ago, I added '-m 350' to this 
command. After that, qemu wouldn't work anymore, not even when I left 
out the -m parameter. Instead, qemu now immediately stops (the window 
displaying 'qemu stopped' in its title) and cannot be closed with 
anything other than ctrl+c in the console from which it was started. Not 
even the BIOS messages turn up. Using the parameter -S I can stop the 
emulation before the crash and get into the monitor, but as soon as I 
enter c in order to continue the window freezes. Meanwhile I have also 
tried gdb as described in the documentation, but as soon as I enter c 
there, same thing: qemu window freezes.

If I use a wrong parameter so that booting fails, the BIOS messages do 
appear up to the obvious point where booting cannot commence. So:

qemu -cdrom /path/to/freedos.img

boots until ' FATAL: Could not read the boot disk'

Same goes for any attempts to boot a live CD with -hda /dev/cdrom

But if I use -cdrom for /dev/cdrom or -hda for the freedos.img, I get 
the freeze. Apparently qemu crashes on my system as soon as it finds 
something it should be able to boot.

I have tried various dad-answers snapshots and now I have 0.6.1 again. I 
have deleted all files with qemu int heir names between installations. I 
have deleted the content of /tmp and even temporarily moved both /tmp 
and /var somewhere else in order to check whether there might be a 
temporary file blocking the process, but nothing changed anything. Qemu 
is no longer working for me.

I'm grateful for any suggestions you might have.


Robin