First I must thank Chris-UK for his help and also a CoMike at http://www.dad-answers.com/qemu-foru...opic.php?t=112 for his post or I would never have succeeded ... however I must say it was due more good luck than to thorough detailed instructions that weren't provided for real QEMU newbies like myself either in the QEMU on-line documentation or the forum posts.

Chris' Knoppix_qemu iso torrent that I downloaded and tried everywhich way but up would not work for me. Maybe bad data ??? or something else ... whatever I next tried to read the online QEMU documentation which was even less helpful. It was only with some luck and a post by CoMike above that I got Knoppix under windows to boot up in qemu. Here is what I did for anyone elses interest ...

My goal now to get a simple knoppix cd working under Qemu on my Win98 machine. I first downloaded the windows installer for qemu from http://ftp.club-internet.fr/mirrors/...win32/release/

After pouring through the online qemu documentation at http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/user-doc.html and trying a lot of things with little success, I read that CoMike said that you must "create a hard disk image with qemu-img". But how ... it would have been helpful if he had given a command line without requiring us newbies to read the "c:\<qemu directory>\qemu-img.exe help" to find out. To CoMikes credit, he told us we needed to do this whereas the Qemu on-line documentation at http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/qemu-doc.html did not seem to explain this at all!

Trying now to get a Knoppix v3.7 iso image to load in qemu ... and since the KNOPPIX_V3.7-2004-12-08-EN.iso being 700MB in size I created the following knoppix.img in my qemu directory at the DOS prompt:
c:\<qemu directory>\qemu-img.exe create knoppix.img 800M
(where the <qemu directory> is the local qemu folder on my c drive. I had no idea what size to use so I made it a little bigger than my iso file size)

The next problem was discovering that apparently on Windows one cannot load a Live-CD into QEMU. (I say discover since CoMike indicated this in his last post (see above link) though Chris-UK will no doubt dispute this. I wasted a lot of energy trying to get my LIVE CD to load into QEMU. Nowhere did the on-line documentation indicate that this was not possible. In fact Chris-UK indicates that he not only did this but also has provided us with an online torrent of a remastered Knoppix Live CD which he says will boot automatically into QEMU under windows. I downloaded his iso, burned it to a CD and was unable to get it to work at all. (If you want to try it go to http://home.btconnect.com/chrisandcarolyn/torrents/ to download his CD) I wasted a lot of time on not getting that to work. Though I do not doubt it may indeed work, there is little good documentation that explains thoroughly how, or I am simply missing some obvious insight.

Anyway I was playing around with CoMike's sample command line and by accident had the KNOPPIX_V3.7-2004-12-08-EN.iso in my <qemu directory> (I had tried it I don't know how many times without the iso in my <qemu directory> without success as nobody told me this is where I must put the iso image), when the following line suddenly worked !!!! at my DOS prompt:
c:\<qemu directory>\qemu.exe -L bios -hda knoppix.img -cdrom KNOPPIX_V3.7-2004-12-08-EN.iso -boot d

While ecstatically happy ... I was trying to understand the command line
Why is "-L bios" not documented in the Qemu on-line documentation ???? as elsewhere I had seen examples of "-L ." and so on that just didn't work for me. Furthermore why is the "-cdrom" argument not "-hda". Again I could not find answers to this in the online doc. Only CoMike used this example. Like a real dummy I thought this meant the iso-image-file was to be loaded from a cdrom. This is not the case as I discovered by removing the CDROM during the Qemu bootup sequences. Furthermore while the online doc does mention the "-boot d" argument, it does not indicate this is to load a CDROM iso under windows ... in fact the on-line doc says almost nothing about loading anything under Windows. To be fair the Qemu site does say that Qemu under windows is in extreme alpha testing stage ... so I shouldn't expect documentation for this but I would be nice to know this instead of spending hours reading the documentation only to find '-cdrom file" in a brief line that seems to indicate where to find a <disk-image-file> rather than a <iso-image-file> as CoMike indicated.

Anyway the upshot is that when giving advice like CoMike's suggested commands:
qemu.exe -L [biospath] -hda [disk-image-file] -cdrom [iso-image-file] -boot d
Example:
qemu.exe -L bios -hda susehd.img -cdrom suse.iso -boot d

... it would really be nice to explain the obvious for the benefit of dummies like myself who spent lots of time trying to interpret it with many failed attempts. For instance what is the <biospath> <disk-image-file> <iso-image-file>, its purpose ... location ... etc. so that unnecessary confusion and wasted time is avoided. I thank both Chris-UK and CoMike for all their help ... even though writing for dummies like myself is not an easy task for anyone who assumes the obvious is indeed obvious. Perhaps I have also succumbed in someway to this error in my own post ... let me know if I have utterly confused anyone and not explained all my steps clearly.

I will add that while the whole exercise was frustrating ... when I did get it working ... the ecstasy quickly gave way to dissappointment when I learned that under windows QEMU emulates at 5-10 times slower than normal use which on my machine was virtually useless while waiting forever just to load and to execute commands. The QEMU accelorator technology http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/qemu-accel.html which drops the speed loss to 1-2 times isn't ready for Windows yet

Doublezz.