Windows 8 Qcow2 !full!

Windows 8 (RTM: 2012, 8.1: 2013) is now in extended end-of-life status (mainstream support ended in 2018). However, Qcow2 images of Windows 8 are still used for legacy application testing, embedded systems, and industrial controllers.

If Windows 8 is on a physical drive ( /dev/sda ), you can pipe it directly: Windows 8 Qcow2

If you have a choice, deploy Windows 8.1 on Qcow2. The driver stack is far more mature. Windows 8 (RTM: 2012, 8

Use if=ide,format=qcow2 as a fallback. IDE works without extra drivers but is painfully slow. Always use VirtIO for production. Windows 8 (RTM: 2012

On the guest Windows 8, turn off scheduled defragmentation for the C: drive. Qcow2 is a sparse file; defragmentation destroys sparsity and inflates file size.

qemu-img snapshot -a <snapshot_name> windows8.qcow2