Raw disk image(img) - inpossible to booting from flash

RouterOS General
1

I have downloaded Raw disk image img for Cloud Hosted Router and installit by rufus at flash 1G but cannot to start this on any PCs.
On one PC is old generation with IDE hard disk controller I have recieved a mistake during booting after “loading system with initrd” (appears some message about PC 86 and this PC immediately turns off).
On other PC of modern generation I have “cannot mount disk” message.

2

They are designed to be used in a virtual environment, not directly installed on hardware.

3

It’s likely CHR doesn’t have drivers for your hardware (disk) so it can’t find root filesystem and fails to boot. Sadly there are no kernel messages so you don’t really know what’s happening.

4

Or it’s designed to be run virtually and not on bare metal.

5



  1. During the first boot of this image, there are several tasks, that are being done automatically, like
  2. extension of partition(s) to the size of the (virtual) media,
  3. installation itself is then automatically done,
  4. after automatic restart of the system, the OS starts running and all the standard services start to function.
  5. CHR is amd64 architecture, and is intended to be run in virtualized environments, not on bare metal. This system (even after the first boot) cannot run on 32bit Intel/AMD/Via cpu’s, as this is 64bit only! RouterOS is the 32bit system intended to run on bare metal intel/amd/via cpu, and it can be downloaded as an iso file (cd/dvd image) on https://mikrotik.com/download at the section X86.
  6. What do you want to use RouterOS for on a physical hardware with 32bit/64bit Intel/AMD/Via architecture?
6

Yes. There is CD Image for this target but it is intended for install from CD-ROM because there downloader syslinux specially for CD-ROM and not flash.

7

how can you mount RAW image to a virtual machine? why vhdx, vdi, etc for?

8

Sure, you install RouterOS from CD-ROM. That is the standard way to install it on the machine, you want to use.
However, if you do not have CD-ROM in your system, you can install RouterOS via Netinstall, that is a windows executable, but needs the correct architecture packages to network boot the system from your workstation, then install RouterOS via the network to the internal HDD/SSD/flash of the system.

9

Which virtualization are you talking about? Each disk/template type is for the particular virtualization platform:

  • VHDX image = Microsoft Hyper-V
  • VMDK image = VMWare Workstation/Fusion/Player
  • VDI = Oracle VirtualBox
  • OVA template = VMWare ESXi, VMWare vSphere
  • “RAW” = Linux KVM, RHEV, Proxmox, etc, which systems all use QEMU/KVM on amd64 architecture.

By the way, you do not mount the image, you attach the image as a disk to the VM! (As for the OVA template, you import the template to ESXi/vSphere system.)
So, if you want to use Mikrotik CHR on e.g. VirtualBox in windows, then you need to download the VDI image file onto the machine, then unzip the file, then attach that vdi file to the VM you created.