[Remix OS for PC] remixtester:
Tools

Tools for creating a bootable USB device, for creating/checking partitions, for modifying the Remix OS file system with root privileges, and for mounting USB drives to Virtualbox

1. Which USB devices are suitable?

You'll need a fast USB device of at least 16 GB. If your computer doesn't have USB 3.0, you can use a fast USB 2.0 flash drive (e.g. Transcend Ultra Speed 16 GB) or an external SSD drive.

2. Creating a bootable USB device containing Remix OS

There are several tools for converting an iso file into a bootable USB device. It doesn't matter which one you take.

The zip archive "Remix_OS_for_PC_64_B2016030106.zip" contains a "remixos-installation-tool.exe" which you can run in Windows.

After booting the USB device and pressing the tab key you'll see this screen:

http://postimage.org/index.php?lang=german

The USB device will have 3 partitions:

- REMIX_OS (4 GB fat32)

- REMIXOSSYS (3 GB fat32, boot flag)

- REMIXOSDATA (8 GB ext4)

Unetbootin is available for Linux, Windows and Mac. It will create only one fat32 partition. The start screen is very similar (!) to the remixos-installation tool:

http://postimage.org/index.php?lang=german

If you use the Windows tool Rufus 2.8 portable or Linux system commands (see link ) you'll create a bootable fat32 partition as well and get an android-x86.org start screen:

http://postimage.org/index.php?lang=german

3. Tool for checking or creating partitions and for modifying the ext4 Remix OS file system with root privileges

You'll need a tool for partition editing if you want to set up a dual boot system with Remix OS.

The file system of your Remix OS has to be modified before updating (see Update Remix OS ) and for rooting (see Rooting Remix OS ).

PartedMagic is a small (350 MB) live distribution for disk management that can run off a CD/DVD or an USB drive (created e.g. with Unetbootin).

Link to a source of the free pmagic_2013_08_01.iso : http://www.heise.de/download/partedmagic-1192431.html .

The pmagic_2013_08_01.iso can be used for booting of a virtual machine with PartedMagic:

http://postimage.org/index.php?lang=german

4. VirtualBox Raw Hard Disk Access

VirtualBox can mount entire physical hard disks - look at http://www.serverwatch.com/server-tutorials/using-a-physical-hard-drive-with-a-virtualbox-vm.html .

This is valuable for 2 reasons:

- Only the bootable USB device with Remix OS can get an OTA update. Mounting this device to Virtualbox will be needed for an update of a Virtualbox installation (if you can't download an iso file containing the current version).

- Running a bootable USB device within a Virtualbox window will allow you to use functions of the host system for taking screenshots or for using external monitors.

Above link (by serverwatch) contains all information needed for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

In Linux you MUST add your user account to the vboxusers group for VirtualBox to see your USB. You MUST also add your account to the disk group as well, or you cannot add the .vmdk file to your Virtual Machine (see http://askubuntu.com/questions/693719/how-to-boot-from-a-usb-drive-in-virtualbox ; reboot is needed).

In a first step you'll have to determine the drive name of your external disk.

The Linux command is sudo fdisk -l . An example of the output listed for an USB device created by the remixos-installation-tool is:

. . . .

Disk /dev/sdc: 16.1 GB, 16055795712 bytes

. . . .

Device boot. Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/sdc1 2048 8290303 4144128 b W95 FAT32

/dev/sdc2 * 8290304 14581759 3145728 b W95 FAT32

/dev/sdc3 14581760 31358975 8388608 83 Linux

You are creating a vmdk-file for above example (i.e. drive name = /dev/sdc ) with

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ~/usb.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sdc

In order to run bootable USB drives in Virtualbox you have to plug in a bootable USB drive and to setup a Virtual Machine this way:

http://postimage.org/index.php?lang=german

If you have plugged in a PartedMagic USB drive you'll see it's start screen after having started the virtual machine:

http://postimage.org/index.php?lang=german

Plugging in a Remix OS USB drive and starting the Virtualbox virtual machine will show the Remix OS start screen:

http://postimage.org/index.php?lang=german

This way you can run a PenDrive installation of Remix OS within a VirtualBox window in order to create screenshots.