Installation

Installation

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Introduction

Android-x86 includes an option to install to harddisk via easy installer. The supported filesystems are:

• ext4
• ext3
• ext2
• ntfs
• fat32

You can install Android-x86 to an NTFS filesystem to co-exist with Windows. See the Advanced section below for details.

Step By Step

• Burn the iso image to cdrom or you can create a bootble USB stick(recommended- you known it is environmental protection).see the Advanced section below for details.

• Boot OS from the Android-x86 installation CD/USB, Choose the 'Install Android to harddisk' item as show below：
  

• After seconds of booting, you will see a partition selection dialog. You can choose an existing partition to install Android-x86, or you can create or modify partitions by choosing 'Create/Modify partitions'(here use cfdisk tools). Note you can install Android-x86 to an external disk like USB drive. If the target drive is not shown, try 'Detect devices'.
  

• Android-x86 can co-exist with other operating system or data in the chosen partition. If the partition is formatted, you may choose 'Do not format' to keep existing data. Otherwise, choose a filesystem type to format.
  
  Note: The type you chosen must match the partition ID or the boot loader will fail to boot.
  

• Also note if you choose to format to fat32, you will see a warning that android cannot save data to fat32. You can still proceed to install, but the installed android system will work like a live cd system. That is, all data will lose after power off. But it has been improved to save data to fat32 or ntfs since 2010. The installer will ask to create a data.img to save data when fat32 or ntfs is chosen.
  

• Next question is whether to install boot loader Grub. Usually you should answer yes, unless you want to install boot loader by hand yourself. Note the installer only creates boot items for Android-x86. If you hope to boot other operating systems, you need to add the item to /grub/menu.lst manually. See the Advanced Section below for how to do this.
  

• If you are lucky, the installation will begin, and you will see the progress bar.
  

• While you see this screen, the installation is complete. Congratulations! Now you can run Andrond-x86 directly, or you can reboot and run it.
  

Advanced

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Create a bootable USB stick for Android-x86

• Use the USB image

Download the compressed USB image, uncompress and dump it to a USB stick.
On a Linux host, you can use the command:

  *for 64bit*
  dd if=out/target/product/x86_64/android_x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdc
  *for 32bit*
  dd if=out/target/product/x86/android_x86.iso of=/dev/sdc

Note where /dev/sdc is the device name of the target USB disk. However, some broken BIOS may fail to boot such a USB disk.
On a Windows host, you have sevral choices like Win32DiskImager or USBImageTool , and what you want.

• Create a bootable USB stick by ISO file

  There are some open source tools that can convert an iso into a bootable USB disk:

  • Linux Live USB Creator ( LiLi ) -- Officially Support Android-x86
  • UNetbootin -- see the demo video. -- Provided Linux/MacOS/Windows

Multi-boot

• To boot other operating systems, you have to add boot items for them to /grub/menu.lst. For example, to boot Windows, add the following:

title Windows`
`  rootnoverify (hd0,0)`
  `brchainloader +1`

• This assumes the Windows is installed to the first partition of the first hard disk. Or you need to change rootnoverify to the appropriate value. See Grub Manual for details.

Issues

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VMware

When using Android-x86 as a VMware guest OS you must change your virtual disk type to be IDE. The default type in VMware is SCSI, and Android-x86 kernel is not configured to support SCSI.

You can follow these steps:

• Create a virtual machine.
• Edit virtual machine settings after the virtual machine created.
• Choose the hard disk and remove it.
• Add a hard disk to create a new virtual disk, then you can choose IDE as your virtual disk type.

When finished, you can install Android-x86 normally.