how to boot QEMU from a cloned USB stick

Configuration: - MacOS arm64 M1 Apple Silicon as host - Live USB with Ubuntu 20.04 amd64 within a squashfs filesystem as guest - QEMU emulator on the host OS I want to strip the OS out the squashfs and boot it on a emulated amd64 virtual machine on my mac. I managed to extract the Ubuntu OS. I mounted the squashfs an copied the content into an img file I created using dd. I copied the image on the mac but when I try to boot the VM says "No bootable device". Here are the commands I used, from a supporting Linux virtual machine mount -t squashfs -o loop /path/to/filesystem.squashfs /sqshfs/mount/point I created an empty image and made an ext4 fs dd if=/dev/zeroes of=image.img bs=1M count=15000 mkfs.ext4 image.img mounted it and copied the files mount -t auto image.img /img/mount/point cp -r /sqshfs/mount/point/* /img/mount/point now on the image I have this folders total 112 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:37 bin drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:37 boot drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:37 dev drwxr-xr-x 147 root root 12288 Jan 10 02:37 etc drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:37 home lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 33 Jan 10 02:37 initrd.img -> boot/initrd.img-5.4.0-150-generic lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 33 Jan 10 02:37 initrd.img.old -> boot/initrd.img-5.4.0-148-generic drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:37 lib drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:37 lib64 drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Jan 10 02:36 lost+found drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:37 media drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:37 mnt drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:37 opt drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:37 proc drwx------ 3 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:37 root drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:37 run drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 12288 Jan 10 02:37 sbin drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:37 snap drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:37 srv drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:37 sys drwxr-xr-t 2 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:37 tmp drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:38 usr drwxr-xr-x 15 root root 4096 Jan 10 02:38 var lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 30 Jan 10 02:38 vmlinuz -> boot/vmlinuz-5.4.0-150-generic lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 30 Jan 10 02:38 vmlinuz.old -> boot/vmlinuz-5.4.0-148-generic converted the img in qcow2 qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 -c image.img image.qcow2 and configured QEMU as follows qemu-system-x86_64 \ -name TEST \ -cpu qemu64-v1 \ -smp cpus=4,sockets=1,cores=4,threads=1 \ -machine pc-q35-7.2,vmport=off,i8042=off,hpet=off \ -accel tcg,thread=multi,tb-size=1024 \ -m 4096 \ -drive file=/Users/steve/VMs/image.qcow2 \ -boot menu=on When I try to boot the VM says "No bootable device". I'm very new abt QEMU and I know this configuration miss something but it should at least try to boot the kernel. GUID?