Re: [Qemu-devel] qemu problem (you might be my last resort)

[Robin Pfeifer <bitpicker@compuserve.de>]

Jim C. Brown schrieb:
> On Sun, Mar 20, 2005 at 09:49:34PM +0100, Robin Pfeifer wrote:
>>>You mean u get the new X window titled "QEMU", which shows the guest OS 
>>>booting,
>>>and once the booting is done the guest OS is actually usuable (at least as
>>>usuable as it would be if it was botted on a real computer)?
>>Not quite. The first disk I tried was a very old DOS 6.0 I still have 
>>lying around (I haven't got that many boot floppies anymore), and it 
>>didn't quite finish booting - but I thought, maybe the disk is broken. 
>>But I have also tried a Linux-based floppy which I have used as a boot 
>>disk previously, and downloaded bootE and tried that, too - I'm finding 
>>the kernel simply stops booting after a while. It does boot normally 
>>during a real boot process.
> 
> Ok, so where does it stop booting? At what point does it freeze?

The BootE floppy stops while the display says 'Loading' with a row of 
dots. But when the emulation window is started, it always displays 'qemu 
stopped' for a short moment, after which the 'stopped' disappears and 
the BIOS messages appear in the window. This short moment is what the 
other attempts do not get over. The floppy emulation passes that.

>>But that still goes much farther than booting a cdrom image, as I 
>>actually get to see the BIOS being set up and the kernel being started. 
>>With a cdrom or image of such I immediately get a blank screen.
> 
>>>Here are a few more tests to try out:
>>>
>>>If you boot from a hard disk, no floppy or cdrom image given, does it work?
>>Hm, would that be something like 'qemu -hda /dev/hda1 -snapshot -m 256'? 
> 
> Probably more like 'qemu -hda /dev/hdb -snapshot -m 256' (/dev/hda1 wouldnt
> work unless you have a partition table on it _or_ you set it up so that the OS
> can boot off of a raw hard disk w/o a partition table (afaik this isnt even
> possible w/ win2k). If you have no idea what I just said, just take my word
> that /dev/hda1 wouldn't work).
> 

/dev/hdb doesn't work, I have no second IDE harddisk - I've got one IDE 
and one SCSI harddisk. /dev/hda results in the 'qemu stopped' error, hdb 
of course in a 'could not open hard disk image'.

> Of course if you did use /dev/hda1 then you should have gotten 'not bootable'
> error too. I'd recommend downloading the freedos 10Meg disk image, or maybe
> the dlxlinux disk image that comes with bochs, and see if those hard disk
> images boot.

I have downloaded the Freedos image and started it with

qemu -hda /path/to/freedos.img -snapshot

Same error: qemu stopped.

>>It appears that qemu becomes weird when it encounters a boot block - 
>>though that doesn't explain why it does boot floppies at least up to a 
>>point.
>>
> 
> 3 ways a cdrom can be made to look bootable:
> 
> 1) a part of the cdrom looks like a floppy disk, and the bios uses this to boot
> 
> 2) a part of the cdrom looks like a tiny hard disd, and the bios uses this
> 
> 3) the bios loads the boot program directly from the cdrom w/o any emulation
> 
> 1) is the most common, and odds are good that your bootable cdroms use the
> floppy disk method. (The reason this is done is for backwards compatibility
> I guess.) So my guess is that it isn't the boot sector, but IDE (if I had
> to guess).
> 
> Perhaps the boot disks freeze up at the point that they try to access the cdrom?
> Or at least detect it?
> 
>>>I'm trying to see if this problem is caused by trying to access the cdrom,
>>>or if it only comes up when you try to boot from it. (BTW how many 
>>>different
>>>cdroms/cdrom images have you tested?)
>>I have tested a couple of live CDs, Knoppix, Kanotix, RescueCD, Insert, 
>>SuSE... all of which boot correctly the normal way. the Knoppix and 
>>Insert CDs I actually booted a couple of times successfully with qemu, 
>>too, before qemu began to fail me.
>>
> 
> These all real CDs, or have you tested images as well?
> 

I have tried images of Insert and Knoppix, and all of the above as CDs.

Robin