Installing HD image on physical media

One way to install ELKS on physical media is to use the ELSK provided HD images, but the CHS (Cylinders/Heads/Sectors) must be adjusted. Let's take the hd32mbr-fat.img. This is a fat image with MBR. Your target physical media could be an old MFM drive, IDE drive, XT-IDE or scsi2sd.

Method 1

The procedure is:

• write the image to the HDD (or the SD card in case of XT IDE)
• boot from floppy on the target computer and adjust the CHS (Cylinders/Heads/Sectors) on the target media/hdd (the one you previously wrote)

Example writing to micro SD card from Windows:

• You can use the dd command for Windows. First list your drives with dd --list. Find the ID of your drive. It should be something like \\?\Device\HarddiskVolume66 and marked as "removeable media". Then use the command: dd if=.\hd32mbr-fat.img of=\\?\Device\HarddiskVolume66 bs=1024 --size --progress. If you see an error then first format the drive as fat32 and remove the assigned drive letter (from Disk Management) and try again. Next connect your physical media to the target computer. Alternatively on Windows try win32diskimager.
• Boot ELKS from floppy with your physical hard drive attached. You need to set the geometry CHS of the image (you have had written in the previous step) to the correct one. This is done with the makeboot command with one single parameter. Execute the command: makeboot /dev/hda1 where /dev/hda1 is your HDD.
• sync and reboot

You should have a bootable ELKS installation on your hard drive. Method 1 has been tested and known to work at least one time.

Method 2

The procedure is:

• boot ELKS from floppy and check the CHS of your hard drive using the text output of ELKS' kernel (CHS can be detected in various manners)
• configure the CHS in ELKS' kernel menu config and generate new HD images of ELKS (this way you should have a compatible image for your hdd). So this step is kernel recompilation and image generation with the correct CHS
• finally write your newly compiled HDD image to your physical media and boot from it

Please note that reporting of CHS might not be reliable on old systems. That is why there are two HDD detection reports "BIOS" and "IDE":

• bioshd: hda BIOS CHS 610,16,63
• bioshd: hda IDE CHS 993,16,63

The "IDE" one is enabled in the kernel config menu in: Kernel & hardware -> Drivers -> Block Device Drivers -> IDE hard drive CHS probe. It might be more reliable than the "BIOS" one on old systems. If they are different - try both. Please note that on very old systems (that do not use IDE) enabled "IDE probing" can prevent the kernel from booting.