I suspect the invalid partition signature is coming from SeaBIOS (QEMU BIOS). [Maybe the MBR itself?]
It is the MBR code FDISK installs, which outputs the message.
But my guess we could partition and format without rebooting if QEMU is detected. Don't know which hardware need a reboot after partitioning and before formating... but I guess that exist.
That is a DOS thing and not only related to QEMU, but to all systems with an uninitialized disk thrown at the FreeDOS installer. The system has to be rebooted after the installer ran FDISK, so that DOS gets informed about the newly created partition (the partitions are enumerated at kernel initialization). The format.exe utility can only be run after DOS has been informed about the partition, because in contrast to FDISK, it uses the device IO functions DOS provides (INT 25h,26h...) and not the BIOS INT13h routines.
So to make things short: to my knowledge, with the current tools the reboot is needed.
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