I've installed qemu and AQEMU on my Ubuntu 13.04 from default repository. I created a virtual machine by using the wizard and set the harddisk to 10 GiB.
I added a Debian 7.1 .iso file to the device manager and fired the machine up. As expected, the iso file was recognized and I was able to start the installation process.
The entire installation went without any errors or warnings. The partitioning, everything was great.
Even when I restarted the VM, after the installation finished, I was able to boot into the new system. After some toying around with it, I shut it down to remove the iso image, when I tried to start again, the 'BIOS' said that there was no partition to boot from. I looked around, and found that the .img file that should hold the virtual disk was only 197,1 kB.
Thinking I made some error I did the entire process again...and again...and again. I tried to create snapshots (which worked, at least I didn't got any error) but when I tried to start from those after shutting the VM down, I just got a black screen, nothing else. Also the img file never changed in size.
I tried to click 'Save', which just brought up a prompt that I can't save in snapshot mode (wtf?).
I'm kind of clueless now. Also I'm frustrated. Where is the installation process going? Why are there no error messages? What am I doing wrong? Is there some hidden command I've to use? I can't even find anything via a search engine that even remotely connects to my problem. And I don't get any errors on stdout, either.
The .img file is in my home directory, so I've read/write permissions.
I didn't have the snapshot enabled on the harddisk, but there was also a checkbox for snapshotmode in the 'General'-tab of the AQEMU window. After I removed that checkbox, it worked.