Virtual environment for XP x64; Host and Guest.

[johnhc]

I have used QEMU to install an nLited Win XP x64 DVD under Win XP x64. It is slow, taking almost three hours. The bad news is there is no accelerator. A 32 bit accelerator (kqemu) is available but there is no 64 bit version. This means that instructions are emulated by QEMU, while with kqemu, the underlying CPU executes the instructions. I suspect it makes a huge difference and I hope someone will upgrade kqemu for 64 bit. Since QEMU is a command line process, I used QEMU Manager, a graphic shell. I tried the latest version (5.0) but I could not get it to work. The DVD would boot and as soon as the text mode drivers were installed and the screen said 'Setup is starting Windows', it hung. Version 4.0 works - it's a little over a year old. With version 5.0 I tried QEMU versions 0.9.0 and 0.9.1. Manager 4.0 came with QEMU Version 0.9.0 and it worked fine. One funny thing happened when my installed system came up. I click on the Start button and the menu opened, but when I tried to clicked on any thing, nothing happened. I had to open the QEMU console and type quit. I then booted the Windows guest and it came up and seemed to work fine. I did not spend much time.

I did have one stop during my 'unattended' install. I had entered an illegal computer name into nLite. Only A-Z, 0-9 and the hyphen is permitted. All numbers is also not permitted. Perhaps nLite could catch this and prevent others from hitting this stop.

When I first tried to burn my DVD, Nero refused. My version (6.6.0.15) of Nero won't burn a DVD+R/W but nLite burned it and it worked fine.

Enjoy, John.