I found some newer Windows binaries at http://qemu.weilnetz.de/ and can confirm I do not see the issue any more.
-- You received this bug notification because you are a member of qemu- devel-ml, which is subscribed to QEMU. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1223467 Title: Unable to use USB as hda in Windows Status in QEMU: New Bug description: I built qemu 1.6.0 from source in MinGW (and all dependents not available with mingw-get) The command line: qemu-system-i386.exe -m 1024 -hda \\.\PhysicalDrive1 -L pc-bios or qemu-system-x86_64.exe -m 1024 -hda \\.\PhysicalDrive1 -L pc-bios (or the *w.exe equivalents) reports in stderr.txt: qemu-system-i386.exe: -hda \\.\PhysicalDrive1: Block protocol 'host_device' doesn't support the option 'filename' qemu-system-i386.exe: -hda \\.\PhysicalDrive1: could not open disk image \\.\PhysicalDrive1: Invalid argument I have also found this bug in 1.5 but not in 1.4 Some Help: The code in Qemu is a bit beyond me at 1am, but I was able to determine the root cause seems to be that block.c is becoming confused about referring to a file but not having a file name. I have been able to work around this by changing line 860 of block.c from: "if (qdict_size(options) != 0) {" to "if (qdict_size(options) != 0 && !is_windows_drive(filename)) {" But I don't think this is a good solution (it is assuming that nothing else could be wrong), and I can't be sure that I'm not masking some real issue. FWIW; Build is on XP, but execution is on Win7. Thanks. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1223467/+subscriptions
