[Sussex] Quick qemu question

[Gavin Stevens]

Hi Ronan,

On Wed, 9 Nov 2005 09:24:10 +0000
Ronan Chilvers <ronan at thelittledot.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 9 Nov 2005 00:20:27 +0000
> Gavin Stevens <starshine at gavmusic.uklinux.net> wrote:
> 
> > What I need to be sure of, is that qemu isn't going to write stuff
> > to my hard drive or do anything that could compromise my system.
 
> Are you using a hard disk image?  You'll need to do this if you want
> to get through the installer.  Make yourself a sparse (ie: only taking
> up the space that's actually used) disk image like this
> 
> qemu-img create hda.img 2000M
> 
> which will get you a 2GB image to install to.  You then call qemu like
> so
> 
> qemu -hda hda.img -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d -monitor stdio
> 
> and it will boot up with the image as the hard disk.  You might
> find the '-monitor stdio' useful - it gives you a control console for
> the instance from which you can send special keystrokes, etc and, most
> useful for you getting screenshots, you can pause and resume the
> emulation as you like.  Type help at the monitor command prompt to get
> a list of commands.

Many thanks for this - most helpful.

Just one more question if I may..

Is it possible to determine where on the hard drive this image will be,
or does it put itself somewhere of its own choosing? Sorry if this
sounds a bit thick - I just want my qemu experience to be safe.

Thanks,

Gavin.