cli guru needed

[Phil Meyer]

On 08/02/2009 11:34 AM, Bazooka Joe wrote:
> Is there a way to combine these 2 commands to cut my time in half?
>
> VBoxManage internalcommands  converttoraw file.vdi file.raw
> then I have to run
> dd if=file.raw of=/dev/sdb
>
> -thx
>
>    

I have set up literally hundreds of CF cards for embedded systems.

My final approach was to give the VM the usb raw device as its disk 
drive and install directly to it.

All I had to do 'postinstall' was run mkinitrd and add the ide and scsi 
drivers to the command line, so it would boot in literally anything 
supported by the kernel.

I used the kvm VM for this because of its simplicity for me.  YMMV.

Pop in the CF card and watch it mount.  Verify the drive id with df, 
then unmount it.

This example assumes that the CF card was mounted as /dev/sdbX.

# qemu-kvm -hda /dev/sdb -cdrom CentOS-5.2-x86_64-bin-DVD.iso -net nic 
-net user -m 1024 -kernel vmlinuz -initrd initrd.img -append "text 
ks=http://10.1.10.197/ks/ks"

For me, I can kickstart a small custom Fedora or Centos build in about 7 
minutes, and pop it into an embedded device and boot it.

Hope this points you in the right direction.

Good luck!