Install Chromium OS without USB Disk

Question

You seem to need a 4GB USB disk or flash drive to install Chromium OS onto before you can install it to your hard drive. Is there a way to install Chromium OS onto your hard drive without a handy 4GB USB disk? It would be nice if I could dual-boot it with Linux or Windows as well.

Solution

Try using the losetup command to make your image file readable ask a disk so that you can copy partitions from it directly to your hard drive:

• Run sudo losetup -f to check the next available loopback device (this will return loopx where x is the next loop device).

• Run sudo losetup /dev/loopx whereyourimgfileis

• Now you have the .img file mounted as a block device, so you can open it with GParted (or optionally another partition editor of your choice; however, I think (GParted is best) :

• Run sudo gparted /dev/loopx /dev/sda

• Now copy the two partitions from /dev/loopx to an extended partition on your hard drive (sda). You probably already know the grub2 config line to add in /etc/grub/d/40_custom to boot it:

menuentry "ChromiumOS" {

insmod ext2

set root=(hd0,x)

linux /boot/vmlinuz root=LABEL=C-ROOT rw noresume noswap i915.modeset=1 loglevel=1 quiet

initrd /boot/initrd.img

}

Comments

[Nikhil Mulley]

would not a dvd/cd do?

[WindowsEscapist]

It can't be run from DVD, only from USB or hard drive (most Chromebooks don't have ODDs anyways, and they're slow and small compared to flash drives)

[wecsam]

How do I copy an install partition? Also, I don't have a USB stick.

[totaam]

if you don't know how to use 'dd', I think buying a cheap USB stick will save you a lot of time

[wecsam]

Oh, wait, I have used dd before. The install partition is inside an IMG file, though. Can dd copy from that?

[totaam]

if you have more than one drive, you can try copying the whole IMG to the disk (you will lose anything on there though) then you can install on the other drive. If not, then you will have to use 'losetup' to access the image as a virtual disk.

[wecsam]

Ah, OK. I will try that.

[WindowsEscapist]

The chromeOS USB is actually made of 2 partitions; it can't be directly dded to a hard drive without data loss.

[totaam]

That's not true: you can copy more than partitions with dd (just point it to the whole device), though you will then need to be careful when extending the partition table to fit the new disk geometry. But that's beyond the point since I don't think you need the partition table to remain that close to the original one: just copy each partition and the partition table's intent (bootable partition, etc)

[wecsam]

All right, I finally got enough work out of the way to try this as a weekend project. When I open the loop device in GParted, it shows up as about 800 MB of unallocated space.

[WindowsEscapist]

Strange. This is really just digested information from someone else - I remember I did it the slow way and actually copied from a USB drive with GParted. Maybe .img files are compressed? Maybe you can make another loopback file and "burn" the img file to it with a program to do that. I'm flattered, but kind of out of my depth now.

[wecsam]

Do you have a suggestion for such a program?

[WindowsEscapist]

OP would like a dual-boot, and dding it to the hard drive would wipe everything else on the disk (I never said you couldn't copy more than one partition with dd, just that you can't do it without losing data.)

[WindowsEscapist]

I don't; all my experiences with .img burners and such have been quite lackluster. Sorry. (I might be completely wrong here anyways; I think I've passed into the land of conjecture now.)

[wecsam]

Oh, well. I might just get a Chromebook sometime.