Hi,

I am having problems I am needing help with. I am wondering if the below is possible.

I want to create an image of my vmware hdd which currently has arch installed and run it from a pen drives and send the image to some friends so that they can run it from pen drive.

so far I have used dd to get the hdd image onto the pendrive this has worked fine and when I try to boot from my usb drive it finds grub and tries to boot into arch but then drops me into a recovery shell, I am guessing this is because it cannot find the same hdd that is on the vmware machine.

So I am wondering how I can get this working? I don't want to manually change every install I would like it to be dynamic.

My fstab is currently using UUID but im not sure whether it is the fstab that is failing or the grub bootloader.

Thanks for any help. It is much appreciated.

Welcome to LQ!

The best way to run that virtual drive is just copying it to the pendrive with cp or whatever program you preffer, and then you'll need the program to run your virtual machine(virtualbox or vmware etc) in a different computer.

The way you did, dd erased the pendrive leaving the mrb with grub and the image of the virtual machine. That will not work.

Cheers

Thanks,

I dont think my first post was clear enough, I have windows installed with vmware running arch linux, I want to run arch linux on any machine from a bootable pen drive.