Hi, win2003 (and as you say win XP) does not detect the media change. As a consequence the cached data gets not flushed (inside win). The "change cd /dev/cdrom" sometimes caused a qemu crash for me.
So you probably found a bug. If nobody else solves the problem it will stay on my list as a low priority problem. TIP: mount your cd rom (images) via loopback and export them via smb (allow samba to follow symlinks and use simple ln -s commands to point to your mount points). Evidently you need a working win to do this. For (ms) win apps you don't need the iso images, just do what ms calls an "administrative install" to your smb server. Administrative installs are compatible with wine (if you like that) and can be shared from multiple clients (e.g. also saving disk space). TIP: to install windows (from MSDN cds) ... step (1) install a minimal system from a bootable cd. (2) make sure that the vm can access your smb server. (3) create a "slip stream" image of the win and SP you want to install on your smb server. (4) making an MSDN cd bootable will often be a problem - don't try it if you don't know better. (5) From your running vm re-install the (slip stream) win that you want via smb. (6) You should not go the other way round (installing a SP on the VM), which takes longer and wastes disk space. (7) start your VM with -vga to activate windows (8) configure your WSUS or other update mechanism and let it install the official patches from MS. TIP: don't panic. At least for win2003 the disk io can degenerate completely so that a login can take 75s. Sometimes it helps to run a disk-defrag (but stop it after a minute or so, otherwise it fills your virtual disk with crap). Here some figures for a P4 2.4 GHz and 1GByte memory (qemu -m 300 with kqemu used): (1) win2003 takes about 60s to boot (a factor of 2-3) (2) a login takes 6s (a factor of 3) (3) old COM based apps like Word have a "slow down" factor of 3 (4) .NET apps seem to run a little faster (VS 2003 is usable) (5) IO is a problem. Don't expect more than 5 MByte/s Win XP/2003 are a least usable and the cd rom bug is not so dramatic. It's also not a Debian problem. Yours Jürgen _______________________________________________ Qemu-devel mailing list Qemu-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/qemu-devel