[Buildroot] Creating a bootable filesystem image?
Sebastian
bastisoft at arcor.de
Tue Apr 8 10:02:58 UTC 2008
Hello Arun,
> My question is, does anyone know if there is a way to configure
buildroot to make rootfs.i386.ext2 bootable? Please note that I disabled
RAMDISK in the > kernel .config before compiling buildroot because I
don't need to use one.
This is because rootfs.i386.ext2 is only a file system image, not a hard
disk image. It is missing the boot sector of the disk, which contains
the Master Boot Record and the partition table. The BIOS on i386 does
only execute the first sector on the disk (the MBR code) which usually
only boots from the active partition. So you need a bootloader, as the
kernel itself is not able to be loaded this way.
Like John said, you can use GRUB. But if you only want to boot a ext2
partition, you can easily get away with Extlinux. It is a syslinux
derivate with support for ext2 (and ext3) instead of FAT. It installs
only into the partition (not into the master boot record), which means
you should be fine by creating and activating the partition containing
your ext2 image.
The changes in scripts/build-ext3-img references ext3 only while
creating the file system. So you only need to change that if you want to
use grub.
Best regards,
Sebastian
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