How do I put Yocto-generated image on a hard drive and boot it? [closed]

Question

I have run bitbake core-image-minimal-dev properly configured for a genericx86 machine. BitBake generates a bootia32.efi, a bzImage--<stuff>.bin, an .hddimg, an .iso, a .rootfs.ext3, a .rootfs.ext4, a .rootfs.tar.bz2, and a core-image-initramfs-<stuff>.rootfs.cpio.gz. I'm interested in a method of how to dd one or more of these onto the hard disk of my target machine and boot from that hard disk.

Answer 1

dd if=path/to/imagefile/imagename.hddimg of=/dev/usbdevicename

You'll find the correct usb device name e.g. by plugging in the usb disk and looking at dmesg|tail output -- do not guess as mistakes will be fatal to your hard disk. A practical example from my build machine:

sudo dd if=tmp/deploy/images/intel-corei7-64/core-image-sato-intel-corei7-64.hddimg \
        of=/dev/sdb \
        bs=4096

Note that you probably want to use intel-corei7-64 as the machine unless you know that genericx86 is correct for your hardware: despite the name former is the common Intel BSP for anything that's not ancient (that includes big Cores, Xeons, Atoms ...).

How to boot the image depends on your target device: you may need to go to BIOS settings to select "boot from USB".