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I would like to turn the disk image from a cloud image (former UEC image) into a bootable VirtualBox (for Vagrant). I can run the image in kvm (using https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEC/Images as a starter), but how can I turn the .img disk file into a bootable VirtualBox disk? I would rather not use the floppy as boot.

htorque
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Magne Rasmussen
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3 Answers3

1

The solution is indeed to make the image itself bootable. After days of searching the interwebs I found that the solution is to use the package extlinux, which is a derivative of syslinux — a solution for making FAT disks bootable. extlinux works on e2fs and derivatives, this works perfectly on any old ext2 system.

mkdir /mnt/image
mount -o loop cloud-image.img /mnt/image
mkdir /mnt/image/extlinux/
extlinux --install /mnt/image/extlinux/
echo "DEFAULT /vmlinuz" > /mnt/image/extlinux/extlinux.conf
echo "APPEND root=/dev/sda init=/usr/lib/cloud-init/uncloud-init" \
     "ubuntu-pass=ubuntu ds=nocloud" >> /mnt/image/extlinux/extlinux.conf
umount /mnt/image

This will make the image bootable, and disable built-in cloud initialization techniques and so on.

Notes: I haven't worked out how to specify an APPEND which allows it to use the "root=LABEL=cloudimage-rootfs".

The resulting image can then boot using qemu, kvm or vmware, without additional floppies, kernels, or anything. And from what I understand, apt-get upgrading the kernel will make that kernel active the next boot.

edit: I forgot to mention the obvious that you need to perform this loop-back mounting on the raw disk image, and then convert the resulting file to a VDI using vboxmanage convertfromraw cloud-image.img cloud-image.vdi

mogsie
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1

Perhaps this is useful? http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/Images#Exchanging_images_with_VirtualBox

kim0
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0

There is now an Ova formatted image that works after importing into VirtualBox, see my long search below. I still haven't figured out how to boot an image in Virt-manager, and would like to, but extlinux didnt help. It's not seeing the kernel file locations with Direct Boot.

What are the different versions available as Ubuntu cloud-images?

alchemy
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