Ubuntu Installation :: Boot ARM .img Installer In QEMU?

The Karmic installers for ARM CPUs are .img files that are meant to be written directly to Flash media, rather than .iso files that are meant to be burned to CD.

I'd like to run the ARM port of Karmic under the QEMU hardware emulator. This should be possible, because the .img files are sector-for-sector images of a hard disk drive. But when I try, I get a panic because the kernel can't mount the root filesystem.

I think the problem is that hard drives are provided by QEMU by emulating an IDE controller, whereas the ARM .image files are meant to be run from a USB stick. Those are accessed via SCSI rather than IDE.

Perhaps my problem is that the kernel I'm using with QEMU doesn't contain an IDE controller. It appears that QEMU doesn't provide a SCSI emulation, just IDE. An alternative would be to convert the .img installer file to a bootable CD-ROM image. Is there a way I can do that? Here is my command line:

Code:
$ qemu-system-arm -M versatilepb -kernel ~/Documents/Kernels/ARM/vmlinuz-2.6.28-versatile -hda ubuntu-9.10-desktop-armel+dove.img -m 256M -append "root=/dev/sda1 rw"
It doesn't work to say "root=/dev/hda1 rw" - it still can't find the root filesystem.