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I have a Raspberry Pi Model B running Raspbian NOOBS, which I'm preparing to use as a media centre / Node.JS server.

I have followed various tutorials and managed to get a premade Raspbian image up and running with Qemu on my Windows 8 laptop. I am, however, unable to get a .img file which I made using Win32DiskImager (a clone of the SD card which contains my functioning Raspbian install) to boot in Qemu.

The image and Qemu installation provided at http://sourceforge.net/projects/rpiqemuwindows/ is nice and clean and quick and it functions, but swapping the .img for my own, I receive the following messages in the Qemu window:

No filesystem could mount root, tried: reiserfs ext3 ext2 ext4 cramfs minix vfat ntfs romfs fuseblock Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,2)

I'm using the following command sequence to run Qemu:

$ qemu-system-arm.exe -M versatilepb -cpu arm1176 -hda raspbian.img -kernel kernel-qemu -m 192 -append "root=/dev/sda2"

I tried different sda values, and I tried using rootfstype=msdos and rootfstype=fat32 since the SD is FAT32 formatted. I've tried using qemu-system-armw.exe instead of qemu-system-arm.exe. I've tried different versions of Qemu while following different tutorials, all with similar results -- an unmountable filesystem. Yet Qemu shows 5 partitions before it errors out. I tried reimaging the SD card -- and ended up with an identical image (same MD5, same total filesize).

So far every tutorial or forum thread I've found discusses creating a new installation for emulation, whereas what I need is to have a clone of my existing, configured system available to me while I'm away from home. Is there a method to achieve this using tools available for Windows 8?

I have read through the following tutorials:

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I know this is an old question but since it comes up in Google searches and I was looking for the same information, I'll post what I've found.

There's a solution for Linux based qemu here and there's Windows based information here.

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  • This looks promising. I will give it a try this week. If it works, you've got yourself a green checkmark. If it doesn't, it's still the most promising lead I've seen since I posted this question a year and a half ago. :)
    – Adrian
    Jul 14, 2015 at 16:31
  • I didn't quite get my image up and running in Qemu. There are a lot of imitations with Qemu and I've reverted to using a real RPi again.
    – BartmanEH
    Jul 24, 2015 at 14:45

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