I recently came upon Haiku OS, which is pretty much a port of BeOS for the modern era.

I downloaded "haiku.image" from the developer's download page. Here's what I want to do:

The file is 100MB.
I have a 256MB flashdrive.
What I want to do is boot my computer from the flashdrive into Haiku OS.

How would I go about putting that image file onto the flashdrive so that it will boot?

Thanks in advance,
Alex

How would I burn the image? That's the information that I need.

I think its the same as using your harddrive. On my dads computer I have linux installed on an external harddrive w/ grub being on the main one. But people install grub to all sorts of things like floppy disks, flash drives, cdroms, etc. So I think its the same principle.

I know it's the same as your harddrive, but how would one go about burning a .image file to a harddrive?

I think you can use the dd command...joeprogrammer seems to be the expert on the matter...

However, I am under Windows, so dd doesn't help me.

I just wandered upon this thread by chance. I'll admit I'm not quite sure how to do this, so don't expect any miracles. First thing is first -- grab yourself a copy of dd for Windows.

Now comes the tricky part: you need to create a partition that's the exact same size as the image you're trying to copy. When I copied partitions with dd , I always noted the size in blocks using parted or something first, and then made sure to create the partition using blocks as the size unit, because it was completely accurate. Creating the partition using megabyte units *should* be accurate enough, and it won't hurt to try. I assume you know how to create partitions using Microsoft's partition manager or whatever it's called on Windows XP. Don't forget to set the bootable flag on the partition.

Once the partition is set up, copying an image in its simplest form is:

dd if=path-to-haiku-image.img of=flash-drive-partition

[edit] Now I'm second-guessing myself. Checking out the Haiku website, it seems as though the downloads are entire hard drive images. In that case, they would contain a partition table themselves, and you would simply copy the image to the device itself, not a partition (you wouldn't need to create a partition for the drive).

So you're suggesting using dd to just copy the image file directly onto the flashdrive?

Perhaps... I'm not quite sure what the image contains. If it's got an entire hard disk image, it'll have a boot sector on it, eliminating the need to create your own. I'd suggest you try this first.

If the image only contains a single partition, it gets a little bit tricker... not only do you have to create a partition that's the same size as the one contained within the image, but after researching a little bit, it appears you need to set up a special MBR to be able to get the flashdrive to boot.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.