CHR is, to begin with, intended for installation in VM … and hence includes a very limited set of hardware drivers. Which includes disk dtivers, NIC drivers, USB drivers, etc. (basically almost all drivers are omitted). And complaining about it eitger here in forum or directly to MT support likely won’t change it … because if it’s properly used in a VM, there aren’t any problems with supported “hardware” (the only issue currently is starting CHR in an UEFI VM).
The x86 version is intended to install on bare metal, but again doesn’t include many hardware drivers. And since it doesn’t use advanced networking features, which absolutely require direct access to bare metal hardware, performance benefits of running x86 instead of CHR are not huge (but this also largely depends on hypervisor used to run VM, some are not very fast).
I have no problems installing to any USB disk. I don’t want to install on USB.
I don’t understand this chr. I don’t want to run mikrotik os in virtual environment. I’m trying to install directly onto the emmc disk. I installed xubuntu on emmc. I left 1gb free space. I tried to install mikrotik os in this empty space via xubuntu. Setup cannot find or see the emmc disk. I tried virtual box, vmware, proxmox, namely the first two. I think it’s just a virtual installation. Is this the case with all boards that have an emmc disk?
Finale for me:
Looking for harddrives…
FATAL ERROR: no harddrives found
Press ENTER to reboot
An emmc disk should go in Linux-like OS to /dev/mmcblk*, cannot say what happens with RouterOS, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if there was no support for that.
i gave the information. i don’t know what the developers of mikrotik os think about this. the result is not a problem for me. i couldn’t do it directly from usb or linux os. let me also note that when i try to install windows on this device, same problem. what feature does xubuntu have that allows it to see emmc during installation?
Mikrotik RoS runs on a slimmed-down Linux kernel that’s customized for embedded devices so it doesn’t have broad driver support for generic x86-64 hardware. On the other hand, Linux distros like Ubuntu are a whole different story - they usually offer full support for most x86-64 hardware.
The emmc drivers are probably missing, very likely, emmc is not very common outside “embedded” systems nowadays, even if there used to be common user machines that ran on emmc storage a few years ago that did run Windows 10.
In any case 8 Gb are not enough to install any recent Windows (unless strongly reduced/lited).
It seemingly has an Insyde H20 Bios/Uefi (which is what we - highly specialized technicians - usually refer to as “huge pile of horseshit” [1]) with very limited options: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/Igel/ud/ud3/M350C/
A “normal” Linux distro should boot and install just fine, but - for different reasons both Windows 10/11 and Mikrotik ROS will be a challenge.
On the other hand modding it to add a m-SATA connector is doable but not exactly easy.
The idea of Proxmox (or another bare Linux+VM) and CHR is not that bad IMHO.
[1] no, seriously, at the time if there was an issue or an incompatibility with syslinux, grub, grub2 or grub4dos, it was with this Insyde H20 Bios, common on some laptops and on thin clients, there is no reason to believe that this newish EFi firmware would be any better.
In my previously limited experience with small embedded systems (Alix board) I couldn’t run an installer to copy to the emmc - instead I had to use a raw disk image, run a bootable USB and install a bootloader and DD the image across.
Unless there is some crazy specific use case I don’t see the need to build a small embedded style system when you can buy a very performant Tik for not a lot of money.
Sometimes it is only to do new, strange things, go where no men has been before and similar.
Is It “smart” or produttive?
Certainly not, but It can be a lot of fun.
how to use win32 disk imager for write ISO image to EMMC. I only see win32 disk imager for windows version. My x86 pc only have emmc storage and don’t have msata for install windows on it. Is it possible for use this method.
Well, what seems to emerge from this thread is that the Mikrotik system lacks a emmc driver, so likely you are out of luck.
If you download a x86 image, it will be a .zip file, you can open it in 7-zip and see that inside it there is a .img file that contains - among other things - a syslinux.cfg with these contents:
default system
LABEL system
KERNEL linux
APPEND load_ramdisk=1 -install -hdd
And a refind.conf (in /EFI/BOOT) with these contents:
The image is that of a "superfloppy" (no partition table, first sector is a boot sector of a FAT16 volume).
So if you boot to a USB stick (or other boot device) to which you have copied with win32 imager (or with dd) the .img, both via BIOS or UEFI it should attempt to install the system to the "hdd", what has to be seen is if your emmc storage will be seen by syslinux or by refind as "hdd".
An altrernative way would be using a VM, installing the system to a disk image of your emmc storage, and then dd it back, but again if that will work is to be seen and results may be different depending on the VM you will use and its settings.
[1]) with very limited options: