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Windows Machines

Guest Installation​

Creating Windows Virtual Machines is fairly straightforward but quirks can appear from time to time, either from upstream code changes at Quickemu or from server changes at Microsoft.

QuickEmu's Windows Installer issue has been fixed, here, for qqX users, for quite some time now.

Following tribal loyalties and forum work-arounds with re-pasted scripts and notes saying 'its quite hacky.. Why this works? No idea..' is not good practice. Using qqX is a much more complete solution.

Remember that qqX gives you disk management, snapshot recovery tools, and much more ....

windows-insider-sdl-1920

TPM & Secure Boot​

If you haven't installed swtpm then see the tpm notes

Secure Boot is controlled by the .conf file and should normally be set to 'off'.

However, early 2025 insider betas are now showing this needs to be set to 'on' and early tests are showing seemingly successful outcomes from the secure boot check routine.

That said, this particular update in question fails to follow through on the boot level section. Possibly due to a number reasons, including that the 'beta' software itself, which introduces WiFi-7, in fact has problems of its own ...

win-insider- sb-upd

The making of between stage snapshots is recommended.

Downloader​

qqX still offers Windows downloads that are not available upstream. Quickemu changes to the 'editions' code in early 2025 did help but they are not complete.

Version 1.12 introduced download resuming. This will work with Microsoft and can be very useful if you have an poor internet connection. You will are only allowed one (or two?) resumes per time-out session but you should still be able to eventually download everything.

win-dl-select

windows dl qqX

Installer​

qqX is auto-set to load the Windows installer in verbose mode and with the Boot manager enabled. This is just-in-case of unforeseen changes and to help problem solve easily.

After the 'Press any key' screen, if everything is okay, you should be asked to confirm a language:

win-install-lang

This will take you to 'location' screen where will need to click on the blue 'find hardware' text link:

win-hw-select

Click on 'Browse' and select the Virtio DVD

win browse virtio

Select amd64 and w11, or as appropriate

win browse select this

Click on the driver. In this screenshot 'viostor.inf' and then click install.

win browse select this

Everything should then proceed:

win-okay

The other CDROM/DVD (ISO) will contain the spice guest msi's which should be installed.

spice-msi

Hardware Record​

qqX will record the virtual hardware that Windows uses in a log file. Remember that Windows is proprietary software and has copy controls. The same rules as in hard metal hardware situations will still apply. If too much changes at once, then Windows will not load.

Make sure to update the hardware record, via the utils menu.

In case of lock-out, use of an older snapshot may help. Or the use the hardware record as the basis of a custom boot file.