Problems about making disk image( qemu-img ... )

[Yu-Cheng Liu]

Hello,
I want to boot linux by QEMU with coreboot ,and I have some problems in
making Linux image.
I followed the steps on QEMU Build Tutorial form coreboot.org.
(http://www.coreboot.org/QEMU_Build_Tutorial)
As the Creating a hard disk image section points out:
1.qemu-img create -f raw disk.img 200M
2.mkfs.ext2 -F disk.img
3.mkdir /mnt/rootfs
4. mount -o loop disk.img /mnt/rootfs
5.mkdir /mnt/root/boot
6.cp vmlinux /mnt/rootfs/boot/vmlinuz
7.cp *initrd.img* /mnt/rootfs/boot/initrd
8.*cp -R /* /mnt/rootfs *

I've done all the steps above, but the image doesn't work on QEMU.

What does the 8th step mean? Does it act as *filesystem*?
If so, could I only copy the directories and the root filesystem to make it
work?

I want to know how to build the image.
P.S. my Linux distribution is ubuntu 14.04

Many thanks.