Hello Laura,
I've tried to reproduce the issues you mentioned locally, and to be
honest with success :)
Issue 1: /dev/sda already partitioned:
The order of options on the command line made the installer image
/dev/sda, and it is really
partitioned.
I avoided it using explicit mapping of drives on the bus.
This then led to bad boot order, so I fixed that using bootindex.
Issue2: floppy disk errors:
This is because qemu by default creates a floppy device.
I suspended this using -nodefaults.
This then led to no video device, so I added one.
The final command looks like this:
qemu-system-x86_64 \
-m 1024 \
-nodefaults \
-drive file=hda.img,format=raw,if=none,id=drive-ide0-0-0 \
-device ide-hd,bus=ide.0,unit=0,drive=drive-ide0-0-0,id=ide0-0-0,bootindex=1
\
-drive
file=guixsd-install-0.15.0.x86_64-linux.iso,format=raw,if=none,id=drive-ide0-0-1,readonly=on
\
-device ide-cd,bus=ide.0,unit=1,drive=drive-ide0-0-1,id=ide0-0-1,bootindex=2
\
-device qxl-vga
This makes sure that the floppy is not created, so there are no errors
because of that,
the hdd is on /dev/sda, the installer image is read only, shown as a
cdrom, is on /dev/sr0.
On the first run the cdrom is booted, when the hdd becomes bootable
that is booted instead.
You might need to adjust the format parameters.
There is still a slight annoyance, this shows up in the starting terminal:
qemu-system-x86_64: warning: TCG doesn't support requested feature:
CPUID.01H:ECX.vmx [bit 5]
This is the result of Ubuntu configuration of their qemu package.
I decided to CC the list, so that we can discuss if these chevats are
worthy to be documented somewhere or not.
Best regards,
g_bor
