My two cents worth at this stage: The fact that you get as far as the BSOD means to me, that your VM successfully goes through the early stages of legacy BIOS boot: the BIOS hands over to the NT bootloader in the MBR, not sure if the next stage in the NFTS boot sector is used, definitely the ntldr.exe is getting loaded, and then something breaks. This means to me that you're using the SeaBIOS that comes with QEMU, and that it probably works fine up to this point.
What numerical code (and perhaps message) does the BSOD tell you? Chances are, that you merely have a mismatch of the disk controller driver for your boot volume. In your guest image, you may have a driver that matches VMware but doesn't work in Qemu. In that case, the earlier boot stages work, but once the kernel loads a native driver for the expected disk controller and tries to access the boot disk, it cannot find the boot disk anymore. There are other possible causes for a BSOD though. To map the disk image, I'd suggest to start with -drive file=/path/file.img,if=ide or -drive file=/path/file.img,if=ide,format=<what_have_you> Apparently QCOW2 is the default image format assumed. The IDE controller driver appears to be always present in the NT kernel (at least it was during the XP era). It might be interesting to know, what "machine" you are using in QEMU. If you're under Linux, how about -machine q35,accel=kvm See also -machine help (if memory serves) The q35 "machine" (emulated Intel chipset) probably does have an IO-APIC, unlike the (default?) more primitive i440. Also "-vga vmware" might be appropriate (possibly irrelevant though). If these are false clues, next up for me would be some mischief in ACPI (between SeaBIOS and your existing install of XP, perhaps its HAL). I seem to recall that there was a time when XP worked in QEMU and Win7 did not, and then it flipped - and the problem was somewhere in ACPI compatibility. Have you tried installing XP from scratch inside the VM ? What version of QEMU are you trying to use? Frank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From: Tony Graham <tgraham...@outlook.com> To: "qemu-discuss@nongnu.org" <qemu-discuss@nongnu.org> Subject: Windows XP support Date sent: Tue, 10 Sep 2024 19:37:56 +0000 > > All, I am desperately trying to wean off of VMware. > > As a test I have been trying to port a VMware Windows XP > guest image over to qemu. I have gone through the process of > converting > the disk image to qcow2. > > The machine starts to boot under qemu but BSOD's, even with 'safe > mode'. > > Using the same image under VirtualBox I can boot it just fine as long > as I select 'enable I/O APIC' in the system settings. As there is no > direct 1:1 settings between VirtualBox and qemu I am at a loss as to > where the issue lies. > > Any tips on getting this running under qwemu would be greatly > appreciated. Keep in mind I am launching and configuring the > Machine presently via virt-manager as I am not yet a qemu command line > guru. > > Thanks.
