Run Windows 2000 in QEMU on Linux

September 25, 2015

This quick guide goes through creating a bootable Windows 2000 CD-ROM (ISO) and then booting and installing Windows 2000 in QEMU with Linux as the host.

Create a Bootable Windows 2000 CD ISO (Optional)

Download WIN2K bootfiles and extract the zip file.

Mount an existing Windows 2000 ISO and copy it to another directory. If necessary, create the ISO from an existing CD-ROM first.
dd if=/dev/cdrom of=windows2000.iso bs=1M
mkdir windows2000
mount -o loop windows2000.iso windows2000
mkdir windows2000_bootable
cp -a windows2000/* windows2000_bootable/

Copy the downloaded w2kboot.bin bootfile to windows2000_bootable/. You can also add any other files you may need in the ISO at this point as well.

Create a new ISO that's bootable:
mkisofs -b w2kboot.bin -no-emul-boot -boot-load-seg 1984 -boot-load-size 4 -iso-level 2 -J -l -D -N -joliet-long -relaxed-filenames -o windows2000_bootable.iso windows2000_bootable

Install Dependencies

You may need to install qemu first.

sudo apt-get install qemu

Install Windows 2000 in QEMU

Create a hard disk image:
qemu-img create -f qcow2 win2k.disk 2G
Finally, boot:
qemu-system-i386 -m 64 -hda win2k.disk -cdrom windows2000_bootable.iso -boot d

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