This turned out to be not enough memory allocated to the virtual machine. When I added "-m 1024" to the parameters, all was well.
-- You received this bug notification because you are a member of qemu- devel-ml, which is subscribed to QEMU. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1811782 Title: QEMU Windows fails to mount rootfs on an ISO where QEMU Linux works normally Status in QEMU: New Bug description: I have installed QEMU 3.1.0 for Microsoft Windows from https://qemu.weilnetz.de/w64/ . When I give the command "qemu-system-x86_64.exe -cdrom ..\QemuSaver\freeduc2.iso", qemu boots the ISO, but the resulting Linux kernel panics when trying to mount the root file system. Running the equivalent command under Linux (OpenSuSE Leap 15.0) results in success. I will attach a screenshot of the command and the kernel panic message. To reproduce the problem, download the zip file from Google Drive here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bAozvGeRF7PbkOnJKzrFHxhUh2kDLz6L/view?usp=sharing, and unpack it under Microsoft Windows. You can either run the installer (which will install QEMU 3.0.0 and an ISO image in C:\QemuSaver) or you can run the command I gave from the directory where your QEMU is installed. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1811782/+subscriptions