Windows on QEMU: Your Complete Guide to Installation, Setup, and Troubleshooting

Okay, so, I’ve been messing around with this thing called QEMU lately, and I finally got Windows to run on it. It wasn’t super straightforward, but I figured it out, and I want to share how I did it, in case anyone else is struggling. This is just my personal experience, so your mileage may vary.

Getting Started

First off, I had to get QEMU installed on my machine. There are a couple of ways to do this on Windows. You can use something called MSYS2, but I went with the pre-built installers. Way simpler, in my opinion. I grabbed the latest stable release from the downloads page, ran the installer, and I was good to go. There are some installer files, and I just got the one that looked like the latest.

Setting Up the Virtual Machine

Next, I needed to actually set up the virtual machine. Now, there are fancy GUI tools for this, but I’m old school, so I just did it through the command line. It’s not as scary as it sounds! First, I made a new folder for my virtual machine, just to keep things organized. Then, I used the `qemu-img` command to create a virtual hard drive. Something like this:

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qemu-img create -f qcow2 *2 50G

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This made a 50GB virtual hard drive named `*2`. You can adjust the size if you need more or less space. The name `*2` could be anything you like.

Installing Windows

Now for the fun part. I got myself a Windows 11 ISO file. I’m not going to tell you where to get one, but you can figure it out. I launched QEMU with the ISO as a virtual CD-ROM, like this:

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qemu-system-x86_64 -accel kvm -cdrom windows_* -boot d *2

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This tells QEMU to boot from the ISO (`-boot d`) and use the virtual hard drive we created earlier. `-cdrom windows_*` means to load the iso file as a virtual CD-ROM. The option `-accel kvm` is used to enable KVM acceleration.

After that, it was just like installing Windows on a real computer. I followed the on-screen prompts, chose the custom installation, selected my virtual hard drive, and let it do its thing. It took a while, but eventually, I was staring at the Windows desktop.

Wrapping Up

So, there you have it. That’s how I got Windows 11 running on QEMU. It wasn’t too bad, once I got the hang of it. I still have to figure out some things, like getting the internet working, but the hard part is over. I have got the internet working. Just install the required drivers, and there is another way to config the network to work. It was kind of a pain to write this all out, but hopefully, it helps someone out there. If you’re trying to do this, just be patient, read the docs, and don’t be afraid to experiment. You’ll get there eventually! And you can always hit me up if you have questions. I might not know the answer, but I’m happy to try to help!