From within a QEMU VM, you can access the host at 10.0.2.2. This is a special network address created by Qemu as a convenience. It is very helpful if you want a “Shared Folder”, similar to what you might use in Virtualbox, in Qemu. This allows us to easily transfer files between the guest and host.

In my case, I am using Windows 7 as the host and a live ISO for Puppy Linux as the guest. I am using the 2.5.0 version of Qemu on Windows built by Eric Lassauge.

Download your Linux ISO somewhere on the host machine. In my case, I downloaded it to C:\linux.iso.

Download and extract the Qemu files on the Windows host machine.

With the required files in place, boot the Qemu VM in Windows using this command (modify it as needed for your environment). 

qemu-system-i386.exe -L Bios -cdrom C:\linux.iso

Create a shared folder somewhere on Windows. In my case, I made a shared folder named share.

Then, from within the guest (as long as cifs capabilities are installed), you can mount a share from the host. Note that, depending on the permissions of the share, you may need to authenticate as the Windows user to mount the share. In my case the user’s name is Will and the password is password. 

sudo mount.cifs \
	//10.0.2.2/share \
	/mnt \
	-o user=Will,pass=password