booting an android iso from GRUB2 : stuck on Detecting Android-x86.......

[Erdin Omanovic]

Hi every1

I didn't succeed to boot correctly the android iso from GRUB2.

I tried memdisk4.05 method, it brings the menu from menu.lst but when i choose an entry I'm stuck on Detecting Android-x86............ which never find the path.

Of course, when i flash an usb drive or a cd and boot from it, no problem.

I tried also unetbootin method to boot iso from GRUB2 (ubuntu) but the result is not better.

Same with grub-images module.

Also, when I extract iso to a directory  and try an entry like :

set $androidpath = "/extractediso"

linux $androidpath/kernel root=/dev/ram0 androidboot.hardware=android_x86 video=-16 INSTALL=1 DEBUG=

initrd $androidpath/initrd.img

I've got th same issue (stuck on Detecting Android-x86...............)

I've tried to add ROOT=/dev/sda3 (the partition where iso and ubuntu are) and/or SRC=$androidpath but it change nothing.

I'm surely missing something but maybe it's not possible at all to boot an android iso directly from hard disk ?

The interest of all of this is of course to avoid flashing an usb or cd with every android iso to test.

Thank in advance for your help!

Cheers

[patpat]

        for device in ${ROOT:-/dev/[hmsv][dmr][0-9a-z]*}; do
                check_root $device && break 2
                mountpoint -q /mnt && umount /mnt
        done

If the device you are trying to mount is either not recognized by the OS or the init script does not find the required squashfs images to be mounted then Android-x86 init will loop forever.
That's why in your case I think the PXE boot is your best bet.
http://www.vercot.com/~serva/an/NonWindowsPXE3.html

[Erdin Omanovic]

thank you for this script Pat

Where should I put it ? 40_custom is destined to be filled with entries directly, not script (if I'm not wrong) ?

Well, I'm not sure I need PXE even if I found it very interesting (Serva seems to be very helpful for installing windows in heterogeneous environments).

Because, when I extract iso and boot with grub2 onto "try android without installing it" everything is ok (/dev/sda3 found and installing ok).

But when I put INSTALL=1 then it's not found, so it drove me nuts a liitle :)

[patpat]

The quoted code is the portion of the init script where you get stuck because of the missing device.
For some reason your system does not find a device named as the script expects (/dev/[hmsv][dmr][0-9a-z]*)
with the Android-x86 images on it.

I'm PXE booting with Serva to avoid USBs/Grub and the like, I'll check the install think you mention.

[Chih-Wei Huang]

SRC= is necessary in your case.
Make sure you have ramdisk.img and system.sfs
in that directory.

If it still failed, enable debuging (DEBUG=1 or 2)
and check the file /tmp/log by
switch to another vt (Alt-F2 or F3).


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

[Erdin Omanovic]

It worked !!

Thank you very much, Chief!

Well, I think I found out the reason why it failed first : the source of iso seems to need to be on another partition than grub and than destination of install.

So, I guess it has to be three diffrent partitions (one for grub, one for destination et one for source) other way it loops or is unable to mount ?