Disc image howtos
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These next howtos are related to disc images . Some if not all of this changes can be make automatic by scripting them.
Contents
How to image USB flash drives (installation from Linux)
To make a bootable USB stick from the appliance you've created, select the disk image type in the build tab, and then build and download the gzip-compressed appliance. Uncompress and untar the appliance.
The GUI way
Install kiwi-tools-imagewriter from the openSUSE:Tools:Devel repository (http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Tools:/Devel/). You can then run imagewriter as root and write your chosen image to your chosen USB device.
The dd way
In order to write your appliance to a USB stick, you will need to find the device to write to. After inserting the USB stick, open a terminal and type:
df
You will see output similar to this:
/dev/sda2 30969600 15533336 13863100 53% / udev 1997904 108 1997796 1% /dev /dev/sda5 92888248 85548000 2621560 98% /home /dev/sda6 23671572 935276 21533836 5% /var /dev/sdb1 7816228 1492 7814736 1% /media/disk
The last entry should be the USB stick you just plugged in. If you're in doubt, try removing it, running df again, and see if the line disappears. The left column in df's output is the partition, and the path up to the number is the path to the device. In our example, '/dev/sdb1' is the partition, and '/dev/sdb' is the path to the device.
Note: It is really, really important that you get the device path right - you can cause irreparable damage to your system if you don't.
After finding the device path, you will need to run dd to write your appliance to the USB stick. dd needs two arguments: the input file (your appliance), and the output file (the path to your USB device). In our example, the input file is named "/home/suse/myappliance.raw" and the path to the device is "/dev/sdb", so we would run this command from a terminal window:
sudo dd if=/home/suse/myappliance.raw of=/dev/sdb bs=4k
The last argument (bs=4k) is optional, but adding it will make writing to the USB device much faster.
Please bear in mind that this will *completely overwrite the USB device so make sure you don't have any important data on it first!
Writing to a USB stick is usually quite slow, so don't be alarmed if it seems like it takes forever. When dd has finished, it will tell you some statistics about how much data it has written to the USB stick. If your USB stick has a light on it that blinks when data is being written, wait until it stops blinking before removing it.
Now you have a custom software appliance ready to be booted from your USB stick!
How to image USB flash drives (installation from Windows)
To make a bootable USB stick from the appliance you've created, select the disk image type in the build tab, and then build and download the gzip-compressed appliance. Uncompress and untar the appliance.
In order to write your appliance to a USB stick in a Windows enviroment, you will need to the 'dd for windows' tool.
To find the device to write, after inserting the USB stick, open the comando line (cmd) and type:
dd --list
You will see output similar to this:
C:\temp>dd --list rawwrite dd for windows version 0.5. Written by John Newbigin <jn@it.swin.edu.au> This program is covered by the GPL. See copying.txt for details Win32 Available Volume Information \\.\Volume{ac56bf46-66cc-11dc-86f6-806d6172696f}\ link to \\?\Device\HarddiskVolume1 fixed media Mounted on \\.\c: \\.\Volume{ac56bf47-66cc-11dc-86f6-806d6172696f}\ link to \\?\Device\HarddiskVolume2 fixed media Mounted on \\.\d: \\.\Volume{d8bf0b41-66cd-11dc-a7a7-806d6172696f}\ link to \\?\Device\CdRom0 CD-ROM Mounted on \\.\e: \\.\Volume{65668b14-8a7b-11dd-ab31-545543445208}\ link to \\?\Device\Harddisk1\DP(1)0-0+8 removeable media Mounted on \\.\f: NT Block Device Objects \\?\Device\CdRom0 Removable media other than floppy. Block size = 2048 size is 695670784 bytes \\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 link to \\?\Device\Harddisk0\DR0 Fixed hard disk media. Block size = 512 size is 120034123776 bytes \\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition1 link to \\?\Device\HarddiskVolume1 \\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition2 link to \\?\Device\HarddiskVolume2 \\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition3 link to \\?\Device\HarddiskVolume3 Fixed hard disk media. Block size = 512 size is 6366334464 bytes \\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition4 link to \\?\Device\HarddiskVolume4 Fixed hard disk media. Block size = 512 size is 468808704 bytes \\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0 link to \\?\Device\Harddisk1\DR7 Removable media other than floppy. Block size = 512 size is 1014497280 bytes \\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition1 link to \\?\Device\Harddisk1\DP(1)0-0+8 Removable media other than floppy. Block size = 512 size is 1014480896 bytes Virtual input devices /dev/zero (null data) /dev/random (pseudo-random data) - (standard input) Virtual output devices - (standard output) C:\temp>
The entry we are looking for is the one that says removable media which is the USB stick you just plugged in. If you're in doubt, try removing it, running dd --list again, and see if the line disappears. The information we need is the \\.\f:
\\.\Volume{65668b14-8a7b-11dd-ab31-545543445208}\ link to \\?\Device\Harddisk1\DP(1)0-0+8 removeable media Mounted on \\.\f:
Note: It is really, really important that you get the device path right - you can cause irreparable damage to your system if you don't.
After finding the device path, you will need to run dd to write your appliance to the USB stick. dd needs two arguments: the input file (your appliance), and the output file (the path to your USB device). In our example, the input file is named "c:\temp\myappliance.raw" and the path to the device is "\\.\f:", so we would run this command from a terminal window:
dd if=c:\home\suse\myappliance.raw of=\\.\f: bs=4k
The last argument (bs=4k) is optional, but adding it will make writing to the USB device much faster.
Please bear in mind that this will *completely overwrite the USB device so make sure you don't have any important data on it first!
Writing to a USB stick is usually quite slow, so don't be alarmed if it seems like it takes forever. When dd has finished, it will tell you some statistics about how much data it has written to the USB stick. If your USB stick has a light on it that blinks when data is being written, wait until it stops blinking before removing it.
Now you have a custom software appliance ready to be booted from your USB stick!
How to copy an image into hard disc
That is the same case as How to copy an image into the USB drive but with the difference that you need to boot with some external media, like another USB stick or livecd with the dd tool in it.
How to change configurations on disc image
You can mount the disc image by using the following command:
mount -oloop,offset=32256 discimage.raw /mnt/
Then change whatever you want to change and umount.
How to try out an image on qemu
You can try out the images on qemu before copying them into USB or disc. Even thought you can do that with qemu, I would recommend to use qemu-kvm as it has a better performance. In any case, the disc image has no free space, as it would expand on the USB or disc, but it would not on qemu. So, after making a copy of it, you can add some free space by doing:
dd if=/dev/zero of=image.raw bs=1 count=1 conv=notrunc seek=3G
And then try the image on qemu or qemu-kvm:
qemu image.raw
or
qemu-kvm image.raw
How to make a USB drive bootable
It is known that in some situation the USB drive would not boot. Even sometimes it will boot once and stop booting afterwards. The problem is that the main partition should be marked as bootable. In order to do that, connect the usb disk and from a terminal do: (/dev/sdb has to be your USB: Make sure of that!)
umount /dev/sdb1 (and any other partition you have mounted automatically. Check it with the mount command) fdisk /dev/sdb \tp «--- print partition table \ta «--- activate partition (bootable) \t1 «--- partition 1 is bootable \tw «--- write changes to partition table