Ben and LittlBUGer have suggested using QEMU for Windows to test the UBCD4WIN ISO file before burning. I have found the necessary files and have gotten it to work successfully so I just wanted to pass on a few links that would be helpful for all of you to use. It is a really excellent tool and saves you from burning too many coffee coasters.

Get the latest QEMU files here (download the 0.7.2 version):
http://free.oszoo.org/ftp/qemu/win32/release/
Install it in c:\program files\QEMU and when it asks to load an OS image, just say no because you will be using your UBCD4WIN image.

Get a really nice front-end called QGui here which launches QEMU for you with all the necessary settings (download the 2.14 version):
http://perso.wanadoo.es/comike/
Just extract QGui.exe to c:\program files\QEMU and delete the rest because it is an older version of QEMU. You might want to add a shortcut to this file in the QEMU start menu section.

QGui is written in Visual Basic 6 so if you don't have the runtime on your PC, get it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...&displaylang=en

The rest of the instructions on how to configure QGui might be easier to see visually, so go to the Running your UBCD in QEMU on Windows section of this nice tutorial:
http://danielha.free.fr/ubcd4win/qemu-en.htm

You will basically be running QGUI and it will spawn off QEMU for Windows for you will all the necessary settings.

The version of QGui that you will be downloading is a later version than in the tutorial so you will see an additional tab called "Embedded QEMU". Just uncheck the box "Embed QEMU inside QGui window", follow the rest of the instructions and you will see a window pop up with your UBCD4WIN environment. Takes a little time to come up depending on the speed of your PC and allocated memory but it will come up fine.

Just remember to activate the mouse by pressing ALT-CTRL when you want to be in the QEMU window and that not everything will work because you are still booted to your main OS but it will allow for some testing. If you want to delete a Virtual Machine configuration, go to your QEMU folder and delete the appropriate .QVM file.

Have fun!!!

*** TOPIC PINNED ***

P.S.

You need to follow the networking portion of the article too:

3. Going further with QEMU
A. Networking

"To make things short, just know that QEMU acts as a router between the guest OS and your real OS. This router is using IP address 10.0.2.2 on the virtual lan (the lan that the guest OS is using). Last thing to know is that DHCP doesn't seem to work for the guest OS (even if the previous link mentions DHCP on the virtual lan). So you must use a static IP address guest OS. This IP address must be in the 10.0.2.x range (IP mask being 255.0.0.0), the default gateway must be 10.0.2.2 and the DNS server must be configured with the same IP than your host OS".

http://danielha.free.fr/ubcd4win/qemu-en.htm

One thing that doesn't work is using a WINS server address of 0.0.0.0. It seems to default to 1.0.0.0

What you can try is to take your DNS server address example 172.16.0.254 and use a WINS server address of 172.16.1.1

Hope this helps.

About the networking, I'm not sure this is a related cause or not but...

With VMWare if you are behind a DCHP router, then you can have DCHP assign IP's to both your host computer and the guest. If, on the otherhand, you are on a DSL or Cable modems which typically only will assign one IP per account ( there are exceptions to this ) then you must use NAT routing to access the inet with. I suspect this may be a similar issue... since you may be behind a modem that will only assign one DCHP IP, the virtual net card is unable to recieve an IP as well.

FYI,

There is another launcher for the QEMU Emulator for win32 called QEMU Manager which can be found here:
http://www.davereyn.co.uk/qemu.htm

It seems to be updated a bit more than QGui and has several more options to be used with QEMU version 0.80 and above.

Most items can be configured as mentioned in the QGui post and help can be found at the
QEMU Dedicated Forum

Have fun!!

FYI,

If you use the UBCD4WIN Configuration Tool (UBCD4WIN.EXE), it contains a link to download QEMU for you and executes the proper commands for it to come up and test your .ISO file. http://www.ubcd4win.com/forum/index.php?showforum=57

My tutorial can still come in handy if you don't use the UBCD4WIN Configuration Tool or would like to use it for another project.

I tried using Load Network Support (DHCP/auto) as opposed to PE Network Configurator and it found all the correct IP addressing and come up just fine.

Hi all !

It's been a while since I last posted on the forum. dirkgently42 sent me a PM one month ago about the QEMU howto I wrote and it appears that I only read his message today ... However, if you think that the howto I wrote might be helpfull, feel free copy it, modify it, make any changes you think are necessary to keep it up to date. You are welcome to publish it on the site as your own.

http://danielha.free.fr/ubcd4win/qemu-en.htm
http://danielha.free.fr/ubcd4win/qemu-fr.htm (yes, it's a french version )

There's only one part in the howto which is not writem by me. This is the networking part which was writen by Fabrice Bellard (the author of QEmu). So if you use it, keep in mind to mention his work. He really diserve it

If you want me to update my pages, I won't promess it will be done quickly, but I will try to do so.

I have also been working with vmware recently and it seems that the free vmware player might be an interesting option to test UBCD4WIN iso images. It is quicker than QEmu (although I did not test the QEmu accelerator) and networking is easier. The only drawback being that you can not create virtual machines with vmware player. However, it's not hard to find empty virtual machines that will boot on a iso file (one being published on the vmware web site). The free version of vmware server should help create empty virtual machines that boot from iso file and have a virtual hard-drive. However, it is still beta and time-limited, so you need to update the beta on a regular basis to keep it working.

Daniel

Some few things that might be helpfull with QEmu

QEmu 0.8.0 is released, so you might want to download this new version :
http://daimon55.free.fr/qemu/
(download file : QemuInstall-0.8.0.exe)

You might also want to download the QEmu accelerator which improves performances :
http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/download.html
- download and uncomress kqemu-0.7.2.tar.gz
- this will create a kqemu folder
- in this folder, right-click kqemu.inf and choose Install in the popup menu

it seems qGui doesn't work anymore with this version of qemu, so I created a small batch file to boot the iso image :


I still have some problems with networking on this new version, but I only spent half an hour working on it ! So you will need to dig a little with qemu command line options to have networking enabled.

Obviously, you will need to change your pathes according to your own setup

Daniel

The new version is pretty slick. I didn't know he had ported the accelerator over to windows.

Cheers

Nize!!! Thanks daniel!
The upgrade to 080 plus the accelerator is well worth checking out.

And now the great news from microsoft

VirtualServer 2005 R2 is FREE

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversyst...re/default.mspx

This gives us lots of diferent testing products

Daniel

Free up through May maybe...

Here's the batch file that I use, assuming:

QEMU is installed at c:\program files\qemu

Your UBCD4WIN iso is in c:\ubcd4win\UBCD4WinBuilder.iso

Use the following batch file:


Note the dot . after the -L in the batch file.

This works great! Now I can test before I waste a CD (married so every penny counts for my hobby/addiction!). I've also tested it using a few Linux distros and they work great too.

Thanks

You can always just use a CD-RW many times if you want to test.