I was not able to reproduce your problem.
Did: wget http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/10.0/hurd-i386/debian-hurd.img.tar.xz paul@jacko:~/hurd1905$ sha1sum debian-hurd.img.tar.xz 1fe25529095a30d5b8fe7c889566f6af56ae41cf debian-hurd.img.tar.xz Each time I try to launch, I erase the old .img and: tar xJf debian-hurd.img.tar.xz resulting with: paul@jacko:~/hurd1905$ sha1sum debian-hurd-20190705.img 332c6ae2ca9ebc8d01c429b0f9dfebe625800e21 debian-hurd-20190705.img paul@jacko:~/hurd1905$ kvm --version QEMU emulator version 5.0.0 (Debian 1:5.0-5ubuntu9.4) Copyright (c) 2003-2020 Fabrice Bellard and the QEMU Project developers I suggest you try: kvm -m 1G -smp cpus=1,cores=1 -drive file=debian-hurd-20190705.img,cache=writeback or: kvm -cpu help have suggested me to try: kvm -m 1G -cpu 486 -drive file=debian-hurd-20190705.img,cache=writeback which works for me.
