From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Sebastian Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:02:58 +0200 Subject: [Buildroot] Creating a bootable filesystem image? In-Reply-To: <326f33790804071158h125bc8c3n9701bf1774ce5611@mail.gmail.com> References: <326f33790804071158h125bc8c3n9701bf1774ce5611@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <47FB42D2.7040905@arcor.de> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net 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