- @cghague
I have a use case where I may be given a bootable USB stick to do an OS test build. My TinyPilot is at a remote location, so I cannot plug the USB directly into target host nor TinyPilot rear USB ports, but can instead VPN to the site, get on Tiny Pilot web GUI and mount an image of the USB to Tiny Pilot, which I believe it supports, similar to my success mounting ISO images. My issue is what format do I need the USB image created as? Rufus only gives me an option to create a VHDX format. Linux has "dd" so I can just save directly to file. What does Tiny Pilot prefer/support?
- CIn reply tojacklh9⬆:Charles Hague @cghague2024-01-20 02:14:06.980Z
Hi Jack, thanks for your question about disk image formats!
TinyPilot supports the following disk image formats:
- ISO images in CD-ROM mode.
- Raw images in USB mode.
Unfortunately, TinyPilot can't directly use a VHDX virtual machine disk image. You'd need to use a third-party utility, such as
qemu-img, to convert from VHDX to RAW.- JJack Hamilton @jacklh9
Thanks for the info--it worked! I confirmed being able to take a 64 GB USB stick I was given running Ventoy and do exactly as you said and use Rufus to create a VHDX image of the USB stick, go into WSL and "apt install qemu" package, use qemu-img to convert VHDX to RAW and then use Tinypilot running latest bullseye image to upload 64 GB RAW image and mount as flash device to boot off of. (I did have to ensure the Tinypilot was running with a newly imaged 256GB microSD card rather than the default 32 GB of course.)
For reference, the convert command:
qemu-img convert -f vhdx -O raw rufus_image_file.vhdx new_usb_output_image.raw
- CCharles Hague @cghague2024-08-14 01:30:09.354Z
Thanks for getting back to me and letting me know! That might be one of the largest disk images we've seen so far, so it's great to know it worked!