This appears to be fixed in 0.13-tobe by this patch: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2010-07/msg00152.html (hence it's "fix released" in debian which now has 0.13 in experimental).
** Bug watch added: Debian Bug tracker #588739 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=588739 -- 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 “qemu-kvm” package in Ubuntu: New Status in Debian GNU/Linux: Fix Released 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.