I had the need to install X86 ROS from usb as I am attempting to put it on a thinclient. The thinclient does not have a CD rom and the way the flash module is made you need a custom cable to connect it to a drive bridge.
In the past I have had to make bootable USB images from CD images back when every one did not produce hybrid images. With the current version of ROS X86 in a project directory and as a root user I done the following.
- We need to create a image file
qemu-img create mikrotik-usb-6.38.iso 30M
- Lets tell the system this file is actually a block device, Then initialize and mount the device to a loop.
losetup /dev/loop5 mikrotik-usb-6.38.iso
mkfs.vfat -F 16 /dev/loop5
mkdir target
mount /dev/loop5 target/
- Now lets copy the data from the CD.iso to our new USB.iso
mkdir source
mount -o loop mikrotik-6.38.iso source
cp -a source/* target/
umount source/
rmdir source/
- Rename files for syslinux boot loader, the cool thing about syslinux and isolinux is they are part of the same project so the syntax is exactly the same for both.
mv target/isolinux/ target/syslinux
mv target/syslinux/isolinux.cfg target/syslinux/syslinux.cfg
- Finally lets install the boot loader on the USB image and unmount the image from the loop.
umount target
rmdir target/
syslinux /dev/loop5
losetup -d /dev/loop5
Your done! mikrotik-usb-6.38.iso is now a bootable image that can be transferred to USB with DD.
The image boots fine but shortly after it complains that the CD-ROM is not present.
It would appear that the Mikrotik coders have set it up so that the RamDisk looks on the CD-ROM for its NPK files to install the system. I have unpacked the ram disk in attempt to alter the code and tell it to look else where but the way the RamDisk works is a bit beyond my skills.
Has any one successfully got a USB installer working, or does any one have the skill to modify the RamDisk to look at it self as a source for the NPK files?