ReactOS Forum

Good morning (or rather evening).

Is it possible to bootstrap ReactOS from another OS (Linux, Windows, whatever) without booting from CD? I don't have no cd drive to boot from.

If so - how?

Apart from other things I have looked at:
- Isoemu did not really work out well when I tried to get that running.
- The doc in the source says make install only works for updating.
- Is it smart to just extract the content from the qemu image (or is the setup actually doing something that will be missing in the end if I don't run it?) - the result wasn't that great (actually I can't say if that's just the current state of reactos or due to the fact that I got my setup from qemu...)

Thank you, Peschmä

While ive never used it i always assumed make install ROS_INSTALL="/path/to/destination" copied a working install to the location you specified.

Building ReactOS wiki page.

Thanks for your answer. But actually the INSTALL file states quite clearly:

INSTALL wrote: 3.1 Installation from sources

If you don't have an existing ReactOS installation you want to upgrade, then
build a bootable CD as described above. Burn the CD image, boot from it, and
follow the instructions to install ReactOS.

which to me sounds really like "do it by cd or else it won't work". Of course i'll try it nevertheless if noone comes up with a definite answer or a different solution. I am just hesitating to set up and go through the build if the doc says it wont work

Peschmä

it's just a new way someone suggested. it's not as if the instructions for ros install came out and said "and by the way, don't try to run the iso with isoemu!"

they were just trying to be clear that you need to burn it before it does anything at least, until now we thought that's what you had to do to use an iso!

isoemu should be a great alternative. when you get it working let us know how you fixed it.

thanks in advance.

peschmae wrote:Good morning (or rather evening).

Is it possible to bootstrap ReactOS from another OS (Linux, Windows, whatever) without booting from CD? I don't have no cd drive to boot from.

If so - how?

Apart from other things I have looked at:
- Isoemu did not really work out well when I tried to get that running.
- The doc in the source says make install only works for updating.
- Is it smart to just extract the content from the qemu image (or is the setup actually doing something that will be missing in the end if I don't run it?) - the result wasn't that great (actually I can't say if that's just the current state of reactos or due to the fact that I got my setup from qemu...)

Thank you, Peschmä

Hi, Welcome to the forums, firstly, qemu is just an emulator and as such, the performance will be less than it would be if running natively on hardware. Secondly, an interesting way of installing ROS is to do it through qemu. There are two main ways of doing this,
1) Booting install CD and mapping a harddrive as 'virtual' C NOTE:You cant do this on the hdd / partition that is currently active with your current os
2) as above except using a qemu image and writing that to the drive afterwards. A could of cautions here, it does work (I have done it a few times) but you have to be very careful to mount the image properly otherwise the bootsector will fail. Dont use a program like WinImage, if you can use something like Ghost. Also, if using a qemu image, make sure it is in the RAW format, (not native qcow)

Good Luck!

TOTMS wrote:=Also, if using a qemu image, make sure it is in the RAW format, (not native qcow)

i'm familiar with the two types of image. any idea if the one bundled with qemu is qcow or raw? (someone said it works with mtools, which would suggest the bundled one is raw but that's no guarantee.)

warm regards to one of the lovliest places on earth. cheers