Ran into this problem today with fresh Windows 2003 R2 install on a IDE boot drive. Because the CD-ROM boot bypasses this problem the install completes just fine, until I tell it to boot from the hard disk (via libvirt).
Latest available packages from Debian testing; qemu 0.12.4+dfsg-3 qemu-kvm 0.12.4+dfsg-1 qemu-system 0.12.4+dfsg-3 qemu-user 0.12.4+dfsg-3 qemu-utils 0.12.4+dfsg-3 seabios 0.5.1-3 The only thing I've been able to find so far is an odd character in the SeaBIOS string when booting from the hard disk, which isn't there when booting from the CD-ROM image. ** Attachment added: "Screenshot of odd character in SeaBIOS string (VNC)" http://launchpadlibrarian.net/51532804/seabios-odd-character-boot-bug.png -- Windows XP/2003 doesn't boot https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/586175 You received this bug notification because you are a member of qemu- devel-ml, which is subscribed to QEMU. Status in QEMU: Incomplete Status in Debian GNU/Linux: New Status in Fedora: Unknown Bug description: Hello everyone, my qemu doesn't boot any Windows XP/2003 installations if I try to boot the image. If I boot the install cd first, it's boot manager counts down and triggers the boot on it's own. That's kinda stupid. I'm using libvirt, but even by a simple > qemu-kvm -drive file=image.img,media=disk,if=ide,boot=on it won't boot. Qemu hangs at the message "Booting from Hard Disk..." I'm using qemu-kvm-0.12.4 with SeaBIOS 0.5.1 on Gentoo (No-Multilib and AMD64). It's a server, that means I'm using VNC as the primary graphic output but i don't think it should be an issue.