Uses:
Install OS on physical drive
Linux installation VMware
Install Windows on physical drive
Boot OS from physical drive
VMware Workstation tutorial
Linux virtual machine to physical disk
Windows to Linux migration
Dual boot OS installation
Boot from external SSD
Linux, Windows, BSD installation guide
Physical drive boot OS........
This seems to have changed for RHEL 8 where a normal dracut to update your initramfs creates a system that only boots for the running kernel. For example if you have Kernel 5 and then chroot into a RHEL 8 variant which uses kernel 4.18, and run dracut, it seems that by default the system will be unbootable.
It is also the case that if you move your RAID array or drives to another server that it will be unbootable, because dracut seems to only include modules needed for the curre........
This was done on Mint 20 but works the same on nearly any new Linux, but is only recommended for people comfortable or familiar with Linux. This method will work on almost all versions of Windows from NT, 2000, 2003 Server, 2008 Server, 2012 Server, 2016 Server, 2019 Server, 2022 Server, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10 and 11.
However, if you want the easiest solution to........
There aren't too many simple guides that show you how to use commands to setup your USB or other drive as a normal bootable drive where you can easily boot custom kernels or whatever OS you would like.
1. Get the tools we need:
We install "syslinux" for MBR and "syslinux-efi" for EFI and "MBR" as we need a tool that embeds the actual MBR into our USB:
sudo apt install syslinux syslinux-efi mbr........
Traditionally kernels were numbered starting from 0 but by default the "new style" of grub boot loading considers each subkernel item to be different so if you have 3 entries for 4.40-148 rather than counting for 1.
To get the expected behavior let's show this example and how we can boot it
We do a grep on menuentry in /boot/grub/grub.cfg to see all of the bootable kernels rather than scrolling through loads of extra entries we don't care about (thou........
Before you try to install and dual boot it is very important to understand the concept of "what boot mode your BIOS is in" and "what mode you booted the installer to".
Then follow the example of Linux Mint (but most Linux installers are very similar)to carefully understand WHERE you are installing your Boot Loader to whether that be MBR or EFI.
How Am IBooted?
First it's important to check your BIOS to see........
It's as simple as below where you just specify the dev device of the CDROM which is usually /dev/sr0. You can boot actual bootable discs like Windows, Linux, etc straight from a physical drive this way.
sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom /dev/sr0 -m 4096
........
The cool thing here is that we only need 1 drive to make a RAID 10 or RAID 1 array, we just tell the Linux mdadm utility that the other drive is "missing" and we can then add our original drive to the array after booting into our new RAID array.
Step#1 Install tools we need
yum -y install mdadm rsync
Step #2 Create your partitions on the drive that will be our RAID array
Here I assume it is /dev........
Use fdisk on your USB drive to create a bootable NTFS partition (in my case /dev/sdb):
sudo fdisk /dev/sdb
Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.27.1).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.
Command (m for help): n
Partition type
p primary (0 primary, 0 extended, 4 free)........
The strange thing is that usually the first install or two will work on any new machine but then it suddenly won't. I had this experience on QEMU 2.13 on a different machine. There is something finicky or buggy about the CUCM installer even when choosing the same virtual hardware specs.
qemu-kvm command:
/usr/libexec/qemu-kvm -version
QEMU PC emulator version 0.12.1 (qemu-kvm-0.12.1.2-2.506.el6_10.1), Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard
........
The key thing is that you must use a "machine"id of "pc-1.3" or it will say your hardware is not supported.
Additionally you MUST use a virtio disk or you will get a ks_pre.sh error as soon as the install starts (a look at logs will show it can't find a disk). This is funny because even though the OS finds the disk and an fdisk -l shows it, it looks like the script looks for a /dev/vda device (virtio) and nothing else, so if you didn't use Virtio as you........
This works for almost all ISO's Ifind (at least Linux based):
sudo dd if=CentOS-6.9-x86_64-minimal.iso of=/dev/sdg bs=20M
20+1 records in
20+1 records out
427819008 bytes (428 MB) copied, 118.233 s, 3.6 MB/s
Of course change the .iso filename above and the /dev/sdg to your desired USB drive!........
Done on Centos 7.3 very important as clearly based on older guides it was a lot easier and more simpler! Hint do not use grub2-install!
If you have trouble booting after this check this CentOS mdadm RAID booting/fixing guide.
One huge caveat if you are an oldschool user or sysadmin who has avoided UEFIbooting
The nor........
Iwas surprised to see that Linux Mint at the latest 17.2 version still has NO mdadm installer option, and worse the installer will not be able to create a proper booting environment even when you do install it.
How to setup mdadm in Linux mint LiveCD
sudo su
apt-get install mdadm
# partition as you need and then create your mdadm devices
# create your SWAP md0
mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /d........
Inever started these processes but they are from a custom based bootable Linux I've made and I've never seen this behavior on other machines or even with the same machine using different kernels. These processes seemed to spawn on their own and I have no idea why and even worse why the CPU usage is so high?
Here's the output from top:
907 extaudit 30 10 0 0 0 R 90.7 0.0........
*Note OS X is strange to install, I thought my HDD was not being detected by you just have to go to Diskutil and create a partition for the root filesystem and then close/move the Window and proceed with the install.
After install Mac OS X 10.4.6 Tiger I get a black screen that says:
b0 error
Most people say the partition has to be marked as "active", actually that just means marked as "bootable". Instead of t........
*This is a bug with initramfs support, all kernels after around 2.6.27.54 suffer from this problem.
If you try to include initramfs into your kernel (I mean actually building your binaries into the kernel) this will always happen. Obviously some code has changed in recent kernels that is present in all new kernels, it makes it impossible to boot
I've tried the latest 2.6.32, 2.6.33, 2.6.34, 2.6.35, 2.6.36, 2.6.37, 2.6.38 kernels and they all do this. I found one bug re........