QEMU/Guests/Windows ME

< Windows 98 | Windows NT 4.0 >

Windows Millennium Edition (commonly referred to as just Windows Me or Windows ME) is an operating system created by Microsoft, released on June 19, 2000. It was the final addition to the Windows 9x series. Support ended in 2006.

Running on CollabVM

Windows Me was quite notorious at time for its random crashes and frequent BSODs, earning the nickname "Mistake Edition" because of this. This mostly happened on physical hardware, though, and doesn't really occur on emulated hardware. In fact, Windows Me is actually your best bet for the stablest 9x experience on any hypervisors ever!

The QEMU Device Tablet, like in Windows 95 and Windows 98, does not work out of the box in Windows Me. However, this trick may work for installing the drivers on Windows Me.

Minus the issues above, it will work fine for a VM.

Starting up

QEMU

Pre-installation

Make a qcow2 image (or a raw image if you want) by typing

qemu-img create -f qcow2 winme.img 1G

1G can be replaced with however big you want the hard drive to be (with G standing for Gigabytes). Windows Me is a very old OS and does not take up a lot of space.

When that's done, run the following command:

qemu-system-i386 -hda winme.img -cdrom winme_iso_name.iso -boot d -cpu pentium3 -m 128 -vga cirrus -net nic,model=pcnet -net user -localtime

Windows Me usually works on, but is highly unstable on, KVM, with very frequent lockups and BSODs. We'll just disable it, since you don't really need it anyways.

You can also use VMWare graphics adapter instead of Cirrus if you have the drivers available.

We set the memory to 128 MB. The absolute minimum is 8 MB, like Windows 95 and 98, although this isn't recommended if you want to be running any programs.

After installation

qemu-system-i386 -hda winme.img -boot c -cpu pentium3 -m 128 -vga cirrus -net nic,model=pcnet -net user -localtime