-boot d : Instructs the system to boot from the CD-ROM first.

Putting them together: is indeed a good feature for specific use cases.

If you want smooth mouse movement, high-definition display resolutions, and lightning-fast network speeds, you must install the VirtIO guest drivers. Mount the to your virtual CD-ROM drive.

Use the qemu-img tool to create the image. qemu-img create -f qcow2 winxp.qcow2 20G

Once Windows XP is installed, you will need to activate it. You can use a valid retail key or a Volume License Key (VLK). If you do not have a key, you may use activation tools, which are discussed in Part 2.