Installed Android x86 on USB, but cannot boot up, seeing "InstallerConnection: connection failed". LiveUSB works just fine.

[Akash Verma]

I tried android-x86-7.1-rc1.x86_64.rpm on a live USB, and it works just fine. However, when I tried installing to a USB drive (installing to the internal HDD is not an option), I'm not able to boot up. It stays stuck on the Android animation.

Alt F1 and logcat shows it repeating the following message:

InstallerConnection: connecting...
InstallerConnection: disconnecting...
InstallerConnection: connection failed...
InstallerConnection: installd not ready
: installd firing up
cutils : Failed to read /data/.layout_version: No such file or directory
: Assuming that device has multi-user storage layout; upgrade no longer supported
cutils : Failed to chown(/data/misc/user/0, 1000, 9997): Operation not permitted
: Failed to setup misc for user 0
: Could not create directories; exiting.

This goes on forever.

I've tried on three different laptops with the same result. Is installing to a USB drive not expected to work? I saw articles online indicating that this should be possible (Android-on-the-go etc).

[Akash Verma]

Okay, looks like the problem is that the installer formats the disk in FAT32 even if you tell it to do Ext4. I manually formatted the disk, and now it works fine. I think it was not able to change permissions on the FAT32 disk since the filesystem doesn't support permissions (not sure why FAT32 is even an option...)

Some apps are not working, but otherwise it seems to be working fine.

[Chih-Wei Huang]

2017-08-01 23:42 GMT+08:00 Akash Verma <email...@gmail.com>:
> Okay, looks like the problem is that the installer formats the disk in FAT32 even if you tell it to do Ext4. I manually formatted the disk, and now it works fine. I think it was not able to change permissions on the FAT32 disk since the filesystem doesn't support permissions (not sure why FAT32 is even an option...)

By using FAT32 (or NTFS) you need to create
the data.img. The installer should ask you to
do so. If you say no, it will just run in live mode.

I guess you manually create the data subdir
instead of data.img?
That's why you encountered the problem.

> Some apps are not working, but otherwise it seems to be working fine.

--
Chih-Wei
Android-x86 project
http://www.android-x86.org

[Akash Verma]

I didn't do anything at all - I just booted from a live USB, installed to this USB hard drive, and then booted from it, running into the issues mentioned. I didn't know that I had to create data.img. I did see instructions somewhere to create the data directory, but I didn't try doing that because the error messages were clearly about permissions. Anyway, it's working now with the Ext4 formatting. Thanks!

[Akash Verma]

I should clarify that the installer didn't ask me anything about data.img.

The installation process was: create live USB using the ISO file, boot from it and select the install option, install to a USB HDD that I let the installer format.

[serge c]

Dear Huang,

is tehre a clear documentation with screen shot which details all steps correctly to install  7.1 on a single boot partition ? because seems there is a lot of confusion.

Thanks for that