Ubuntu 10.04 i386 server ISO to IMG conversion using QEMU

**karthik_h** · April 12th, 2011

Hello all,

I'm trying to convert a ubuntu server ISO to a virtual disc image in order to deploy it in a Opennebula cloud environment. I followed the procedure mentioned at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/Images I initially created a blank img file using the following command.
$qemu-img create -f qcow2 ubuntu.img 2G
And then I tried to use the ubuntu ISO to install ubuntu in to the img file created above using the following command.
$qemu -m 512 -hda ubuntu.img -cdrom ubuntu-10.04.2-server-i386.iso -boot d
The only thing I see after this is init kbd. I waited for about 25-30 min without any improvement.
The underlying processor is Intel Xeon 5640 processor. Operating system installed is Ubuntu 64 bit 10.10 server edition.

I have searched in google and went through a few posts in here as well but did not see some thing very relevant to this issue. Could someone please help me find my mistake.

Thanks.

**teeks99** · April 13th, 2011

I don't know a ton about open nebula, but does it have the ability to mount a virtual CD drive? The server ISO isn't something that you can run from (unlike the live-cd), all you can do from there is install the operating system onto another disk. I'm betting that isn't what you want a clone of.

What I recommend is to create a new VM image on a desktop machine (virt-manager with KVM is fairly easy, VirtualBox might also work). Then load the ISO image you have as a virtual CD drive (the .img file you made is a virtual hard disk). At this point you can install the operating system using the menus on the virt-manager screen. Once this is done, you can deploy the working .img file to all the instances you want to run on.