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How to install EasyOS on a new SSD

June 28, 2023 — BarryK

Page originally written March 13, 2019
Completely rewritten June 29, 2022, for EasyOS version 4.2.2 or later
Updated: July 2, 2022; December 31, 2022; June 16, 2023
Updated: June 28, 2023

This page describes how to install EasyOS on an entire drive, completely replacing what was on it before. This can be any drive; SSD or magnetic-platter HDD, internal or external. Also USB flash-sticks or SD-cards.

The original case study was install to a SSD in a Mele PCG35 Apo mini-PC, but these instructions apply to any computer with x86_64 CPU. Any amount of RAM, from 2GB upwards, and a video card with at least 800x600 pixels resolution (1024x768 minimum is better). And, as stated above, any drive, not just an SSD.

Also, any age PC, from very recent, right back to PCs with early x86 64-bit CPUs (earliest supported is the "nocona" CPU). If it has the ISA or EISA card interface, not PCI or PCIe, then it is too old.

It needs to be stated up-front, that installing EasyOS onto an entire drive is an extremely simple operation. Basically, you download the latest release, write it to the drive, then set the BIOS-Setup or UEFI-Setup to boot from the drive. There may be some extra details that you will need to consider, but that is the essence of it, "easy peasy".

The original case study

Back in 2019, the author of this page (Barry Kauler), bought a 240GB 2.5inch SATA Kingston SSD, and installed it in the Mele. An easy operation. Snapshot:

image1

The Mele has Windows 10. Which raises the question, how to download the latest EasyOS and write it to the Kingston SSD? While running Windows? Or bootup EasyOS or some other Linux from a USB-stick?

Either will be OK.

Download and write EasyOS to a drive

The current release of EasyOS (at the time of writing) is the Kirkstone-series. Download the latest from here:

https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/kirkstone/

Let's say that it is 'easy-5.4.1-amd64.img'. You will also see an 'md5sum.txt' file, grab that too. It is important to verify the download file has not been corrupted. In Linux, you can do this:

# md5sum easy-5.4.1-amd64.img

...that will return a checksum, that you can compare with what is in 'md5sum.txt'.

If you are running Windows, there is an 'md5sum.exe', available from various sites, for example, here:

http://www.pc-tools.net/win32/md5sums/

To write the file to the drive, in Linux you will need to know its drive name, and be sure that it isn't mounted. Let's say that you identify the drive as /dev/sdc, do this as the root user:

# dd if=easy-5.4.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdc bs=1M
# sync

...don't forget that "sync" to flush everything to the drive. And, be absolutely sure that /dev/sdc is the correct drive. /dev/sda is most likely your primary drive, and you definitely don't want to over-write that!

Another point for newbies, is write to the entire drive, in this example /dev/sdc, not to a partition, which will have a number, like /dev/sdc1

Any extra note: if you bootup EasyOS on a flash-stick, you will have available "EasyDD", which is a frontend for 'dd' -- it is in the "Setup" category of the menu. Read more about EasyDD here:

https://easyos.org/install/how-to-write-easyos-to-a-flash-drive.html#EasyDD_frontend_for_dd

...that page has a download link for EasyDD and it can be run on any Linux distribution, not just EasyOS.

If running Windows, you will need to install an app that writes an image file to a drive. This is not a CD/DVD burner app! -- though some apps might do both. Here are a few of them:

Win32 Disk Imager
https://win32diskimager.org/
USB Image Tool
https://www.alexpage.de/usb-image-tool/
Etcher
https://www.balena.io/etcher/
DMG Editor
https://www.uubyte.com/dmg-editor.html

EDIT June 28, 2023:
We are no longer recommending Balena Etcher. Reasons given here.
 

The Author has only personally used "USB Image Tool". "Etcher" used to be recommended by the Raspberry Pi people, but in recent documentation they are recommending "DMG Editor". USB Image Tool usage is described here:

https://easyos.org/install/how-to-write-easyos-to-a-flash-drive.html#USB_Image_Tool

In Windows, if writing to an external drive, you will find in the tray an option to flush all buffers to the drive, to make it safe to remove.

That's it EasyOS is installed. In the drive, you will find two partitions, a 7MiB fat12, and a 816MiB ext4 partition. The former has the Limine bootloader, so that is the boot-partition and will handle booting on either legacy-BIOS or UEFI computers. The ext4 partition will get expanded to fill the drive at first bootup -- so you can have any size drive, up to 2TB.

The only remaining task is to get your computer to boot from the new drive...

Precaution

Before explaining how to boot the new drive, a digression. This section is added as someone hit this problem, and became very confused.

As stated above, there are two partitions, a vfat boot-partition and ext4 working-partition. The former contains the Limine boot-loader and the latter is where EasyOS is installed.

The boot-partition contains file 'limine.cfg', which contains text, including a line like this:

KERNEL_CMDLINE=rw wkg_uuid=1ca8506e-79f5-11ed-b964-287fcfeb4376 wkg_dir=easyos/

This tells the Linux kernel what partition and the folder where EasyOS is installed.

What the person had done was boot EasyOS from a USB-stick, then dd the image-file to the internal drive. The exact same version as booted on the USB-stick. He then tried to boot the installed EasyOS, while leaving the USB-stick plugged in.

This caused the Limine boot-loader to be confused, as it saw two partitions with the same UUID, and bootup failed.

If you are new to all of this, don't worry about the technical details. Just recognize the problem that has occurred, and the simple fix...

Solution: power-off, remove the USB-stick, then bootup Easy on the internal drive.

So the precaution is, avoid a situation where there are two partitions with the same filesystem UUID. Also good to avoid partitions with the same filesystem label.

A further digression, without wanting to add too much verbiage to this page; if you are running a Linux distribution, you can see the UUID and label of any partition, and change if desired. For example, say that the working-partition of the internal drive is sdb2:

# blkid /dev/sdb2
/dev/sdb2: LABEL="easy2" UUID="1ca8506e-79f5-11ed-b964-287fcfeb4376" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="35e141c5-02"

This will change the UUID to a random value:

# tune2fs -U time /dev/sdb2

...and you will then have to edit 'limine.cfg' with the new UUID value. Anyway, this is very much a "corner case".

Just one extra note: there are two alternatives to "wkg_uuid" on the kernel commandline; "wkg_dev" or "wkg_label". These are explained on this page:

https://easyos.org/dev/guidelines-for-debugging-easyos.html

Back onto booting Easy...

Configure to bootup EasyOS

There are a lot of decisions to be made here, depending on your situation. That's a rather vague statement, but what it boils down to, is you have to tell the BIOS-Setup or UEFI-Setup to boot EasyOS, or make an entry in an existing boot manager, such as GRUB, to boot EasyOS, or install a boot manager.

The above paragraph might seem complicated, but for the case study of this page, we already have a boot-loader installed; Limine. The only thing remaining is to configure the BIOS-setup or UEFI-Setup to boot it.

Which is pretty easy to do. Before explaining that though, another digression...

The page linked here has extra very useful information. Especially please read it if the computer has Windows installed:

https://easyos.org/install/prepare-your-computer-for-booting-linux.html

...it explains certain precautions need to be taken to ensure Windows does not become corrupted in a dual-booting setup.

Anyway, the very simple procedure to get the computer to bootup EasyOS...

You can configure the BIOS-Setup or UEFI-Setup to boot EasyOS. You need to know the hot-key that you hold down after power-on of the computer, usually "DEL", "ESC", or "F12", and you will find a text-mode interface where you can choose to boot EasyOS.

Note, most PCs have two different hot-keys. One of them brings up a boot-menu, the other brings up the BIOS-Setup or UEFI-Setup. The boot-menu is a once-only choice, it doesn't alter the BIOS/UEFI firmware flash memory. That's OK for a quick test, but if you want to make the new boot-choice permanent then you will need to go into the BIOS/UEFI Setup.

In the case of the Mele the hot-key is the "ESC" key, and the UEFI-Setup will open:

image8

...notice, the "SanDisk Extreme" drive is at the top. That is a USB-stick, that the Author booted EasyOS from in the original case-study. The Kingston SSD is down at #5, and it has to be moved up to #1. Note, #3, "[UEFI OS]", is a fat32 esp partition that the Author created for earlier installation experiments -- just ignore that.

So, you choose the Kingston SSD, and off you go, the Limine menu will display for several seconds, then EasyOS will startup and you have a desktop:

img9

You can leave EasyOS as the default choice in the BIOS-Setup or UEFI-Setup; however, there is something interesting to think about...

In the new drive, the Kingston SSD in the original case study, you will see two partitions; as already mentioned, 7MiB fat12 boot-partition and a second ext4 partition that has the installation of EasyOS.

That boot-partition has the Limine bootloader, and it has a menu, file 'limine.cfg', to which you can add more entries. You could make entries for other operating systems installed on the computer, including Windows.

Barry has posted how to add Windows 10 to the Limine menu, at his blog:

https://bkhome.org/news/202207/how-to-add-windows-to-the-limine-boot-menu.html

So, from the Limine menu, you could choose to boot a different OS, if the fancy takes you.

Note also, EasyOS has "Limine Installer", in the "Setup" menu, that can be used to discover all of the installed OSs and automatically create a 'limine.cfg'. You could use this to add extra OSs to the existing 'limine.cfg' file.

Conclusions

You should find the steps described on this page to be pretty straightforward, fun, and, we expect, very rewarding.

Of course, writing an image to a drive is something that you must take responsibility for. If you accidentally overwrite the main drive, that is your fault! These instructions are given with that understanding.

One very good thing about the method described above, of going into the BIOS-Setup or UEFI-Setup and choosing the new drive, is that it does not alter the main drive at all. You could simply remove the new drive, and go back to how everything was before.

Anyway, enjoy!

Oh, and do be sure to monitor Barry's Blog, to find out about new developments and releases:

https://bkhome.org/news      

Tags: install