Is it possible to install ToaruOS on a hard drive?

[mxlgv]

I apologize right away. I may not have learned much about the system, but I would like to be able to save ToaruOS files and settings on the hard drive. Apart from this, I don't know if there is a "connection with the outside world" from the virtual machine. Now I use a small http server on the host system and the fetch utility to transfer files to ToaruOS.

[klange]

ToaruOS does have drivers for ATA hard disks, as well as an incomplete write-capable EXT2 filesystem implementation, but due to neglect they are both known to be buggy. Through a manual process, ToaruOS can be installed to a hard disk alongside Grub as a bootloader, packages can generally be installed, and with some luck files will persist between reboots, until something inevitably goes wrong. No automated installer has been developed, and the in-house bootloader does not support loading files from EXT2 filesystems.

Instead of doing a full install, you can create a hard disk image, format it either directly as EXT2 or using an MBR partition table with an EXT2 partition, and provide that to your VM. You can then install the ata and dospart modules, find your partition in /dev, and mount it somewhere. If you're willing to do a custom build, you can also modify the startup scripts on the CD image's ramdisk to do this automatically.

Now I use a small http server on the host system and the fetch utility to transfer files to ToaruOS.

I do the same thing =)

There's also a tool called upload.krk that will toss files over TCP sockets that you can use with nc on a host to get files in the other direction. I usually use it to get native screenshots out of a VM:

# Host
$ nc -l 6024 > /tmp/test.tga && convert -auto-orient /tmp/test.tga /tmp/toaru_screen_$(date +%F_%H_%M_%S).png
# Toaru
$ upload.krk /tmp/screenshot.png 192.168.1.1:6024 # or whatever your host's local IP is

[mxlgv]

Thanks for the answer. Can I use fat32 instead of EXT2?

[klange]

There's no fat32 driver, so no - unless you want to write one yourself.

#174 is an old tracking ticket for implementing fat32 and fat16.

[mxlgv]

It's clear. Let's see, file systems are still difficult for me.