ls not working

 I am running Ubuntu 14.something as a virtualbox guest on a windows 8.1 host.

I start elks with qemu-system-i386 -fda full3 from elkscmd directory.

I log in as root.

When I get the prompt, if I do a

cd /bin
ls

or

cd /usr
ls

the emulator hangs and I have to CTRL-C out of it and restart qemu.