QEMU image
Creating image files
A hard disk image file can be created by qemu-img (or on Windows by QEMUMenu too).
I.e. to create a 1G hard disk image file, type in command prompt:
qemu-img create -f qcow harddisk.img 1G
See qemu-img for more information.
Overlay images
QEMU uses a concept called overlay images. Once you have done your initial install, you can create an overlay image and run QEMU off this. The overlay image is very much smaller than the original image and will only contain changes made since the original install. If you trash your installation while using overlay images, you can simply delete the overlay image and create a new one from the original image.
To create an overlay image os.ovl from the original os.img, issue the following:
qemu-img create -b os.img -f qcow os.ovl
To run QEMU now with the overlay image, you would use:
qemu ... -hda os.ovl ...
instead of original os.img.
If the os.ovl installation is ruined, you can delete it, and start QEMU using the os.img file. But you will lose changes made since the original install.
See http://qemu-buch.de/d/Anhang/_qemu-img and http://qemu-buch.de/d/Speichermedien for further information.
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