How To Run Google Chrome OS From A USB Drive [Windows]
Just a few days ago, Google announced the release of the Chrome OS source code. Within less than 24 hours, the web was littered with disk images for running the new OS on virtual machines such as VMWare and VirtualBox. I even managed to put together my own Google Chrome OS download in the form of a complete VirtualBox appliance. I’m pleased to announce that I’ve taken it a step further, and now you can easily try it on your own computer from a USB thumb drive.
Before You Get Started
Before you decide to download Chrome OS, there are probably a few things I should tell you about it. It is in the very early stages of development, so there is still a lot of stuff that doesn’t work. In fact, it may not work for you at all.
You should also be made aware that this operating system is very simplistic by design, as it is intended for use on netbook computers. By definition, a netbook is a small and inexpensive laptop intended for very casual use such as web browsing and simple office tasks. When you launch Chrome OS, pretty much all you get is a web browser. Don’t be surprised if you go through all this and say to yourself, “I did all that work just to log into a freakin’ browser?”
Requirements
First of all, you will of course need a USB drive you can use to try it out. The disk image is 2,988,442,112 bytes, so you’ll probably need a 4GB thumb drive to be able to use it. If you have any files on your USB drive that you need, be sure to back them up to a safe place because this will wipe all the data from your USB drive. Consider yourself warned.
You will also need a computer that allows booting from a USB drive. You’ll need to instruct your computer’s BIOS to boot from the USB drive instead of the hard drive like it normally does. When you boot up your computer, it should provide you with information as to how to bring up a boot menu. On some machines it is the F8 key and others the F12 key or some other key.
If it all scrolls by too fast, some computers will allow you to pause the boot sequence by pressing the Pause key. That should give you all the time you need to read all that stuff on the screen to see if you can find out what the boot menu key is (if there is one). If you don’t see anything about a boot menu, you could also try editing your BIOS settings to boot from the USB drive. You may wish to consult your computer (or motherboard) manual on how to do this.
You will also need a little bit of luck. Chromium OS may or may not work on your computer hardware. I did successfully run it on two home-built frankenstein computers (with ASUS motherboards), but it did not successfully recognize the network adapter on my Dell laptop. All of this work may be for nothing, if it ends up that Chromium OS does not like your network adapter. Ah yes, I forgot to mention that you do also need a computer with a network adapter.
Finally, you’ll need to download the necessary files to put Chromium OS (that’s what the open source version of Google Chrome OS is called) onto your USB drive. I’ve packaged it all together in a torrent for you:
Download the Chromium OS for USB Torrent (Right-click and Save As)
You’ll need a good BitTorrent client like µTorrent to download it. If you’re new to BitTorrent, be sure to check out our Big Book of BitTorrent. You’ll learn more than you’ll ever want to know about it.
The torrent has a zip file that includes the disk image, as well as a Windows tool for putting the image onto a USB drive. The program you’ll use to create the Chrome OS USB boot disk is called Image Writer for Windows. It’s a nifty little tool for writing disk images, it’s free, and it’s open source.
You don’t need to download it seperately because I’ve already included it in the torrent. I just wanted to mention the good folks that developed the great application and send them some link love as well.
Installing Chromium OS to your USB Drive
Unzip chrome_os_usb.zip, and launch Win32DiskImager.exe. If you need a program to unzip the archive, you can download IZArc. If you get the warning below when you launch Image Writer, don’t sweat it. It’s looking for a floppy disk that’s not there.
Once you’ve got Image Writer running, click the folder icon and select the chrome_os.img file (it should be located in the same place where you extracted the zip file and launched Win32DiskImager.exe).
Connect your USB drive to your PC. If you have autorun enabled, you may want to wait a few seconds for your computer to do its thing. Just close whatever window may pop up. Next, click on the Device dropdown and select the drive letter that corresponds to your USB drive. Then, click Write and the program will commence writing the disk image to your USB drive.
Boot Up Chromium OS
You’re now ready to boot up Chromium OS! You can just leave the USB drive in your machine and reboot it. When the machine boots, press the boot menu key on your keyboard. Select your USB drive from the menu. In about 10 seconds or so, you should see the Chromium OS login screen.
Login with chronos and password. This will log you in as a local user. Once you log in, you should see what looks almost just like the Google Chrome browser. If you click on the Chrome sphere in the upper left corner, you should see a Google Accounts login page telling you to log into Welcome. Log in with your Google Account.
If you do not see this page and you get a browser page that says it could not find the page requested, then unfortunately luck is not on your side. It means that Chromium OS doesn’t like your network adapter. You could still however try it out in a virtual machine if you so desire. If you were able to succesfully log in, you should then see the application page.
As you can see, it is all in the cloud. All the applications you see on the app page bring up different webpages, and everything you do takes place within the browser. In my experience, although it did boot up relatively fast, the browser tends to run a bit slow and is a bit jumpy. Although the calculator and notepad launch properly in little popover windows, the apps don’t work and nothing loads into the windows at all.
The To-do List application doesn’t work either, and you get a Google.com account login page. Note, this is not the same as a Google Accounts login so you won’t be able to log in with your Google Account. The Google.com login page is only for Google employees. The Contacts application brings up a Google Talk gadget that doesn’t appear to work.
As I said earlier, a lot of the stuff isn’t working right. You’ll also see right at the top of the application page a message that says UI under development. Designs are subject to change.
All the other applications are simply links to webpages. One thing that I found rather amusing is that when you click on the Hotmail icon, it takes you to Gmail. However, the Yahoo! Mail icon does indeed bring you to the Yahoo! Mail login page. I suppose Google likes Yahoo! better than they do Microsoft.
So what do you think of Chrome OS? Do you think it is the netbook operating system of the future?
(By) Jorge Sierra is a geek of all trades. Be sure to check out his blog, GeekLad
WOW. Thanks guys. Excellent article just as always. I’ll certainly try it!
I get a link to a page of code, no torrent download?
The other link at the top of the article works fine
You need to right-click and save as
(Comments wont nest below this level)Cheers! Easy when you know how
Very helpful, I had followed another guide and managed to get it all running, but they didn’t mention the username and password! Pretty essential stuff. Got it working, but it is jumpy as you mentioned. Fun to try is all.
sign in with your google account
I corrupted my flash drive. oops.
D’oh! You may want to try the HP USB Format tool to fix it up and reformat it. Although it’s an HP tool, it works on most USB thumb drives without a problem.
You didn’t corrupt it, diskimager changed the format and added a partition. Go to command prompt and type:
DISKPART
SELECT DISK 1
CLEAN
CLEAN (just to be sure)
EXIT
EXIT
It is now ready to reformat.
So how is it any different from a web browser ?
It’s not a browser for start. It’s an OS that runs through the Cloud. Online storage.
@OP, can this be put in a cd/dvd for bootable as well?
It absolutely is a browser. It is an OS that runs through the cloud, but that’s because everything in the OS is a simple web app. The whole thing is the Chrome browser, running on top of a customized Linux build, where everything else is locked down so that all you can use is the browser.
(Comments wont nest below this level)Alex, the image will only boot from a USB drive as far as I know. Google may eventually provide some tools for building a boot DVD for it.
(Comments wont nest below this level)re: JK III
> So how is it any different from a web browser ?
This can boot up your computer
Or in simpler terms – This doesn’t need you to have Windows*
(*or Linux or MacOS or Dos or …)
Hmm – how long should it take to write to the USB drive? The progress bar isn’t going anywhere, and the drive keeps blinking – about 10 minutes by now.
Yeah, it shouldn’t take that long. If it takes that long, it probably isn’t going to work.
How can I get this to run on VirtualBox?
I wrote up a tutorial for running it on VirtualBox:
http://geeklad.com/download-the-google-chrome-os-virtual-machine
If you want to do the same on Ubuntu, use a client like BitTornado, Transmission or kTorrent to download the files, then use the following terminal command to mount it:
sudo dd f=’/directory/where/you/put/chrome_os.img’ of=/dev/sdb
Assuming your USB drive is mounted as /dev/sdb (check System -> Administration -> Drive Utility)
Great tutorial, tried it on my desktop. No problems. I haven’t tried it on my laptop, which is a little older.
Great post, Jorge!
Would you be so kind as to post the steps you performed to generate your Chrome OS image? It’d be helpful to build our own.
Thanks Eric! If you download the torrent on my blog for running it on a VirtualBox virtual machine (different torrent than the one we posted here), I included a text file with the steps I used to compile it. Here’s the link to the tutorial on my blog:
http://geeklad.com/download-the-google-chrome-os-virtual-machine
I essentially took notes and put them into a bash script, but I haven’t confirmed that the script will run and build it without issue from start to finish. Regardless, I think it’s pretty close and should be a good start to help you build it yourself, particularly if you’re on Ubuntu. I used a Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit machine to build it.
Perfect, thanks a ton! I’m replacing my LUKS-encrypted Ubuntu install on my USB key with Chrome OS, but I’ve got three partitions so I’ll probably have to do a bit of magic with partitioning to make sure my FAT32 partition can still be mounted in Windows.
I’ll probably write it all up in a blog post when I’m done. Thanks again!
(Comments wont nest below this level)Would love to try there, does anyone else have anything other than torrent though? It doesn’t seem to be working for me.
Did you try right-click, save as? You may need to first save the torrent file, then load it in your BitTorrent client.
How fast is it? I tried the virtual Chrome OS and it was very slow.
Can it be viewed in full screen? I have a resolution of 1440 x 900. Would it configure accordingly?
It ran full-screen in a pretty decent resolution on the two machines I ran it on. Both computers had GeForce video cards. Your mileage may vary, depending on what sort of hardware you have. It did run a bit slow and jumpy for me as well.
Does Chrome OS include a POP3/Imap email client, and can you save downloaded files to a USB memory stick?
No, it’s all Gmail or webmail, no apps other than web apps.
Alternately I found using the VMware image last week that just logging in to Chromium OS with my Google name and password automatically logged me into Gmail and iGoogle.
I understand the market for this OS, and also understand that this is an early build that contains quite of extraneous code that will not be in the final build.
But there is something I just can’t wrap my head around.
With as simplistic as this OS is, how can the image possibly be ~3GB?
I mean you can get an XP install down under 1GB quite easily. Comparing the feature sets between XP and ChromeOS is nothing short of a comedic exercise. On top of that, a large part of ChromeOS is supposed to be stored in the cloud right? So why is it so large?
Can we really expect ChromeOS to shrink by well over 300% by release?
The one I’m downloading is around 300MB, what are you downloading?
Much of the ~3GB is free disk space. If you open a terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run
df -myou’ll see that not all of the 3GB is in use.o I did this with a 4GB flash drive, decided I wanted it off of my flash drive and formatted it. When the format was complete, I was left with a 949MB flash drive. WTF?! Does anyone know how to fix this?
you may need to delete all the partitions on the drive and recreate the primary partition.
Go do disk management in windows.. Should be in ‘right click’ on my computer and select manage.. it is one of the options there.
Thanks for your help, but I already fixed it using this tool: http://www.pendriveapps.com/lexar-usb-flip-the-removable-media-bit-tool/
(Comments wont nest below this level)I figured it was a partition issue but I couldn’t fix the problem in Disk Management.
How would I burn this image to a USB using Ubuntu?
does anyone know if this same process would work with a cd rom? i.e. would installing chrome and everything work because I assume you could choose the optical drive as easily as the thumb drive in the boot menu
Tried it, it’s cool and easy.
But is there option to shutdown?
To shut down you can just press the power button on your computer and it will shut down gracefully. I didn’t see anything in the interface to shutdown or reboot. If you want to reboot gracefully you can open a terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T), type
su rebootand enter password for the password.“If you want to do the same on Ubuntu, use a client like BitTornado, Transmission or kTorrent to download the files, then use the following terminal command to mount it:
sudo dd f=’/directory/where/you/put/chrome_os.img’ of=/dev/sdb
Assuming your USB drive is mounted as /dev/sdb
(check System -> Administration -> Drive Utility)”
I get the error “unrecognized operand
`f=/home/xxx/Downloads/chrome_os.img'"
when typing in that command.
Try:
sudo dd if=”/home/xxx/Downloads/chrome_os.img” of=”/dev/sdb”
(Comments wont nest below this level)Im assuming this is the USB image used.. Can you still login using google account \ pass?
Yeah, but you’ll have to log in as a local user first (username chronos and password for the password).
no wireless adapter, right ?
There may be some wireless adapters out there that it will work with, but I had no luck on my Dell D600.
Running on my HP Mini2140…didn’t recognize my wireless adapter, but I tether my Blackjack smartphone to the laptop under windows.
I plugged the phone in under Chrome OS and hit internet sharing…I was connected…worked great.
(Comments wont nest below this level)it does recognizes my wireless adapter and connects to my network, but it doesn’t browse the web.
no problem with ethernet.
Btw it’s pretty slow, I tried it with an eeepc 704 and verbatim 4gb thumbdrive
I have just been lazy to get the Google Chrome OS and run it on a Virtual Machine, besides I wanted to really test if outside the Virtual Environment. Great post.
Can anybody know how to use this on Bootcamp? is it possible?
I get as far as selecting to boot from the USB flash drive on my Intel Atom 330 1.6GHz Dual-Core CPU, with NVIDIA® ION 330, but it doesn’t boot. The flash drive blinks a bit on a regular basis, but that’s all. Should it work on the above machine?
Tried it on ASUS 1008HA and it came straight up
Only snag is I ordered a Norwegian version and the keyboard is chaotic with Chrome OS.
Pity the ION 330 system doesn’t work. Might be something to do with the ASRock’s special boot system..
tested, didn’t work with my thinkpad x200 and x61 wireless network
Yes, I run ChromeOS on my PC ASUS M4N78 Pro from boot USB drive.
On my MSI Wind there was no working trackpad or wifi. where am i supposed to put my music and pictures etc.
Followed all the steps but wont work, is there any way to do this to a Hard Drive?
No, you need to boot from USB first, although it is possible to install to the hard drive once you’ve booted it from a USB drive. If you couldn’t get it to work, I recommend trying my VirtualBox tutorial:
http://geeklad.com/download-the-google-chrome-os-virtual-machine
Ok,I’ve have had it installed in virtual box for a while now. Does virtual box update chrome os?
(Comments wont nest below this level)No, you run Chrome OS on VirtualBox. You can install the OVF file in this torrent to do it:
http://geeklad.com/downloads/chromiumos.torrent
Ok,Im trying the tutorial again.
What do i do with the .ovf file?
Ok,I figured it out.
THANKS, BUT CHROME OS DONT RUN ON MY MACHINE..
NOW, I WANT TO FORMAT MY 4GB USB DRIVE, BUT IT SAYS IT’S ONLY 900MB AVALIABLE TO FORMAT.
THAT MEANS THAT MY 4GB HAVE BCOMING A 1GB USB DRIVE? HOW I FIX THIS? FORMATTING JUST RECOGNIZE 1GB
Look a bit further up in the comment thred for comments made by ManMadeHuman and Camron.
Great post! I’ve recommended it to my friends as well…
I’m wondering though, do you know how I should go by keeping this OS up to date with future builds? Or is the automatic update already implemented?
There aren’t any automatic updates at this time, but I’m certain that at some point they will be implemented.
Worked flawlessly on my Acer Aspire 100 using an Ativa 4GB USB drive… wireless worked too using WEP. Too cool!
Luck was not on my side. I definitely look forward to a build that will run on my Samsung N120, but for now, that is one Netbook for which this does not work. Bummer… Was so excited when the login screen popped up…
(apologies for being a moron… didn’t know where to find network settings, but found them and am now surfing using Chromium and elated about it… elated, I say)
Thank you for the guide, I used it to try Chrome OS (or is it Chromium OS?) on a Dell Mini 10 (1011). You can read the issues I had with it here.
Quick breakdown of the facts: no luck with wireless either (Dell 1397 adapter, so it would have been futile to try it on my D630 since it has the same one), “jumpy” usage, a couple of bugs and the CPU meter reports bollocks. And it’s REALLY up in the cloud. No connection = you’re totally .
I don’t see it as the future of OS. As a OS-on-a-stick, yes, but as the primary OS, without internet access, your machine is just a nice furniture piece or decorative item, depending if you have a desktop or a laptop.
.
have you tested the Chrome OS USB on many computers???
are you SURE that it don’t create problems to the PC’s file system and data?
.
It shouldn’t write anything to the existing filesystem, unless you instruct it to do so. There is a command to install it to a hard drive, but it will wipe the entire hard drive.
What is the command to install to the hard drive? I’m running an eeepc701 and it seems to be working fine from the USB.
(Comments wont nest below this level)heya guys,
i just wondering, since Chrome OS is basically a web browser based OS.
How secure and safe would it be? Since, we boot Chrome OS direct from a USB drive WITHOUT our Antivirus, Firewall and other protection softwares we usually install in our PC/Laptop running.
thanks
With Chrome OS, so you don’t need Antivirus as you do with Windows much the same as you don’t need Antivirus on Macs. It’s quite safe as far as viruses are concerned.
I’m not sure if it includes a firewall or not, I haven’t really looked under the covers in great detail. Besides, I run all of my machines behind a router/firewall anyway. I wouldn’t recommend running it on a direct Internet, since the shared password is simply set to password.
Trying it out on my Asus EEE 901 and I find it actually makes browsing a better experience for me when compared to firefox under eeeXubuntu. Everything just loads quicker even though far from perfect.
Two questions: 1. Will this work if I put it on an SD card an 2. will this work on a intel based mac?
1) Yep, as long as your machine has an SD slot or you have some kind of USB adapter for an SD card it should work fine.
2) It should work pretty much the same as it would any other Intel machine. As far as whether or not it will work w/ the Mac network adapter and video, I don’t know. Only one way to find out.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. You may be able to find some posts in some forums somewhere of folks that have tried it on Mac hardware. So I suppose there are two ways to find out.
Any fix for the “network adapter not recognized” issues?
There’s no easy way to do it, but you may be able to find some Linux drivers for your network adapter or compile a kernel module.
I connected my (wireless) router to my MSI Wind 123 with a cable and was able to log on to Chromium with my normal G-mail password. Everything worked great and was significantly faster than the VirtualBox version (which also kept crashing). The wireless works fine with Ubuntu, so I guess I’ll ask in the Ubuntu forums for the location of a possible driver. Thanks!
(Comments wont nest below this level)Did you found a driver for the wireless and how did you install it?
I tried to model instructions used in Ubuntu for recoognizing the network and described here: http://bit.ly/54Nvk1. Some of the terminal commands were not recognized by Chrome OS so I reached a dead end when I tried to import them.
I download the file, wrote it to the USB drive as a bootable device, but now when I try to boot, I get a “no operating system found” error. I checked and rewrote the img file to the USB using the instructions from above. what am I missing…other than maybe the ability to cognitively think this through.
It should at least attempt to boot up if you’re selecting the right device from your boot menu. It may be your computer’s BIOS doesn’t like the way the USB drive has been formatted.
I am selecting boot from USB and it starts to read from the USB. the error it gives me is:
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM.
Missing operating system.
No Operating System found.
Any thoughts? Would love to get this thing working. I am installing Chrome OS on an older (5yrs) Gateway MX7515. I am doing this just to test Chrome OS.
(Comments wont nest below this level)After some research, I decided, against my better judgment, to beat the tar out of the bottom of the laptop. All is working now. Weird. Who’d a thunk it?
Once inside, I learned that my wifi connection is not compatible…at least not yet.
Thanks for the great write-up and tutorial. Downloading the USB image now. Can anyone confirm if the ChromeOS “likes” the Intel WiFi Link 5100 AGN wireless network adaptor? Thanks in advance.
No ChromeOS (ChromiumOS) doesn’t like this wifi card – i am working to enable this.
How are OS updates going to be released? Is there a URL to check?
You would have to manually write a new USB image. As of now, there is no automatic update mechanism. I’m sure that the production release of Chrome OS will include an autoupdate mechanism.
I am using an 8GB flash drive (empty/Formated) and when I try to write to Flash Drive, it tells me that there is not enough room on Drive. Using Vista 32-bit system. Should I try on my XP?
That’s odd, it shouldn’t say there’s not enough room. Perhaps the drive has a partition smaller than 3GB that it’s trying to write to? You may want to see what partitions are set up on it via Disk Management (just search Google for vista disk management).
I have a 2G pen drive and the program says is has no space ?
it is formated .
what could it be ?
thanks
k
2GB won’t be big enough. A 3GB drive might just be big enough, as the file is just under 3 billion bytes. However, I don’t have a 3GB pen drive to confirm this. 4GB is big enough for sure, because that’s how big the drive was that I used to test it out.
I tried a the USB boot on my HP Mini 311 and it would not work, I saw it access the boot drive but no go. I installed VirtualBox and downloaded the Vbox image (below) and it came right up with no issues. Thanks Jorge!
http://geeklad.com/downloads/chromiumos.torrent
I got my Compaq F700 to work. WiFi seems to work fine. I needed to enter my network pass key and then I had internet. Running off a SanDisk Cruzer 4GB which is a little slow, but visiting all my web sites was easy and works fine. I was surprised to find when rebooting to Chrome all my passwords were saved and my history was retained. I’m sure this wouldn’t happen with a CD/DVD version.
Thanks guys
Does majority of linux commands works with this OS?
It does have many typical Linux tools built into it (although the man pages are not installed). You can open a terminal window with Ctrl+Alt+T to get a shell prompt.
I am fascinated, but I cannot help but fear that Google/Chrome is the next big bully. Dos –> Windows –> Google
mysilentscream
It is in the very early stages of development, so there is still a lot of stuff that doesn’t work. In fact, it may not work for you at all.
I am running CHrome OS on my EEE901 now, but i can’t get a wifi connection.
Ethernet works fine, but anyone an idea to make the wifi works?
Thanks
You may want to try the Ubuntu forums for network drivers, as one other commenter was going to attempt.
Lauwie: Wifi is working on my Eee 900A so it may be your wireless router that’s incompatible. Try a different wireless network if possible.
What do you mean?
(Comments wont nest below this level)I just can’t get my wifi on… I can’t see any wireless network.. And my network is oke with ubuntu…
I have the RT2860 or something like that…
Anyone an idea?
Sorry, what I said earlier does not make sense. Chrome apparently supports the radio in the 900A but not 901. I thought they may be the same radio, and since it works with 900A, thought the problem might be with your router. At least you can give thanks that the ethernet works so you can take Chrome for a test drive.
Ran it from an sd card on an eee pc t91mt; wifi worked (as well as, interestingly, the battery monitor), but the OS was very slow.
Thanks! Just what I was looking for. Wasn’t sure if this would work well on the 701. This is just what I wanted to hear. Works like a charm!
how to change the boot options? my screen gets garbled when booting, how can I change the vga modes?(something like vga=791)
I don’t know of any way to change the vga modes. It sounds as though Chrome does not like your video adapter.
well i have had vga problems with ubuntu too.. fixed it with the vga=791 option
(Comments wont nest below this level)“If you do not see this page and you get a browser page that says it could not find the page requested, then unfortunately luck is not on your side. It means that Chromium OS doesn’t like your network adapter.”
Not necessarily – it might just be missing your WEP/WPA passkey. I entered mine and it’s been fine since – eee900.
This is true, you will need to configure your wireless security settings if you are connecting via wireless adapter. Thanks for pointing this out. When I wrote the article I was connected via wired machine, but had no luck with my wireless laptop.
I’ve loaded Chrome onto an 8gb thumb drive, and it runs pretty well, but Chrome would have fit on a 4 gb drive and now my 8gb shows up as “needs to be formatted” in windows explorer. Is there any way to use one drive as bootable chrome and flash storage? Otherwise it’s bye bye to Chrome for me.
Chrome currently runs too quietly on my speakers(and the headphone jack just turns of the speakers but doesn’t play anything in the headphones). Is there volume control in Chrome?
It’d be nice to have a guide to all the neat “extra” things it can do, like the process and file browsers, and a guide to what it can’t do (like apparently it can download files but not use/play/open them) would also be usefull. Do these exist anywhere?
You should be able to create a new partition in Windows. Just run Disk Management (just search Google for disk management windows.
Not that I’m aware of.
The Chromium OS developer FAQ has a list of shortcut keys. You can also press F8, which provides a keyboard overlay with all the keyboard shortcuts. If you hold down Ctrl+Alt while viewing the overlay, you’ll see all of the shortcut keys.
As far as what it can’t do… That would be a fairly long list, as there are many things it cannot do in its current state.
Perfect, thanks for the quick reply.
(Comments wont nest below this level)Oh, well, actually, the disk management suggestion didn’t work. I can see the disk and the “unallocated space”, but right clicking doesn’t give me any options other than “properties”, which still doesn’t let me do anything. Any suggestions about what could be going wrong?
My Targa 1016 netbook booted ok from a SanDisk Cruzer 4GB but somehow it doesn’t seem to recognize the keyboard? I’m stuck on the login screen…
Any clues on how to deal with this?
Thanks for the great tutorial and image file.
I think you may be out of luck if the keyboard doesn’t work. Perhaps you could try using it on a docking station or with an external keyboard.
I used chrome os in the virtual box ….. The notepad,Contacts and To-do lists are working perfectly….any problem in compiled image?
It looks like they fixed the calculator. Contacts doesn’t really work for me, and to-do list still brings up a Google.com login page.
When I Click write after I choose the img and the usb drive letter I get the error 8 and doesn’t proceed further. Please help!!
You need to run the “clean” command from DISKPART – I had the same problem until I followed those steps. Unfortunately you can only do this in Vista and Se7en, as XP won’t pick up removable drives in DISKPART.
It’s not help. Also I tried 0.1 Win32 Disk Image – it’s not work too. I tried other programs that can write IMG to USB? but nothing, only Error 8. I try write to 8GB USB if it’s does meter.
(Comments wont nest below this level)I think I broke it.
Yesterday it worked fine (alebit slow and a bit clunky, due to it running off a stick), but today it refuses to work properly at all. First attempt would only load the calculator gadget in full screen and wouldn’t allow me access to the browser – every other attempt and it can’t seem to get my resolution right, like it’s running in “Safe Mode” or with the wrong drivers.
My major gripe with it is probably the panel system – I never much like the blocking of pop-ups in Chrome and this seems to be an extension of that. As a developer, the little screen space you get would be very restricting, however I can understand that this is supposed to be point. Similarly, are all smaller apps going to run in panels? Should they be kept open down the bottom all the time? Won’t that get busy? Why aren’t there shortcuts on the main screen? Are we going to get shortcut keys?
Still, it’s over a year away now. I’m sure they’re come up with something.
Here is a link to another .img file that Dell assembled for the Dell Mini 10v:
http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/archive/2009/11/25/chrome-os-wi-fi-support-running-on-a-mini-10v-source-code-available.aspx
Yes so great but now my usb drive is useless. I can’t formate the whole 8gbs only 900mbs.
Look a bit further up in the comment thred for comments made by ManMadeHuman and Camron on how to fix this.
I’ll test it for my Netbook but also the Dell version.
Click here
and post back with the results.
Cheers
Wireless on Asus EEE PC 901 failed =(
Wireless on Asus EEE PC 901 failed =(
Thanks for the great support Jorge! It was interesting to get a preview of Chrome OS so soon
Jorge, this works great off a thumb drive on my ASUS EeePC 900. I ran the chromeos-installer but it doesn’t boot of the SSD once I’m done. Am I missing a step setting a partition active or something? Odd that it would work great off USB but not off SSD…
I’m not that familiar with booting from SSD drives. Is it treated like a USB drive or more like a hard drive? If it is the latter, you could try running the Chrome OS hard drive installer. Just open a terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run the following command:
/usr/sbin/chromeos-installWhen prompted for the password, type password. However, do so at your own risk. This will wipe everything from the drive.
I haven’t run the installer, so I’m not sure what will happen if there are multiple disks on the machine. I don’t know if it will prompt you where to install it, or if it will do it’s own thing. If you do run it, please feel free to share your experience here.
That’s exactly what I did. I checked first to see what /dev/ my SSD was (acts like a hard drive). It was /dev/sdc so I issued /usr/sbin/chromeos-install /dev/sdc and it ran through the process and asked me to reboot. When I did, it wouldn’t boot. Again, just odd that it would boot and run fine off the thumb drive but not boot off the SSD. I tried making different partitions active (ChromeOS built 4 partitions) but it didn’t help. Oh well, I can settle for booting off the thumb drive for now. Thanks again for posting this!
(Comments wont nest below this level)I ended up doing something like this:
dd if=/dev/[usbdevicename] of=/dev/[ssddevicename] bs=4M
to copy the USB to my netbook’s SSD and now it boots up as if the SSD is the USB drive. Good enough for me.
(Comments wont nest below this level)Thanks for sharing. Dur, I should have thought of just using dd. Easy enough to do.
Installed per directions worked fine on my new 1005ha but the wireless doesn’t work, so there is basically nothing I can do with it. Installed onto an 8gb SDHC card.
Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance!
it worked on my nokia 8gb card. But after i formatted,it shows only 980mb! Chrome OS eat my space..
Any how to recover..?
thnks
Use Windows Disk Management to delete all the partitions and create a new one that uses the entire drive. Just look it up on Google
I just tried it and was somewhat unimpressed. I don’t see the utility of this project when there are plenty of full-blown Linux OS’s that can run off of a flash drive, unless they are trying to compete with Splashtop-like features on laptops where you don’t have to boot into the real os but still do basic web surfing. If you can only use it when you are connected to the internet, what’s the point, if they cannot expand it beyond a simple cloud OS then I don’t see this being a very successful venture. However, Google may give the open source community valuable publicity and help the average user see Linux in a more favorable light. What would be really cool is if they could make this distro bootable to small devices like phones and tablets (like the nokia n810) and provide a full featured web experience without high resource usage.
I take it all back; I am using ChromiumOS on my wife’s Asus eee 904hd and it is awesome, I can actually stand to use the thing; it does all you really need from a netbook.
Now you know why Google has partnered with netbook manufacturers to preload them with Chrome OS.
My mom has an Asus netbook with Windows XP and it runs atrociously slow and takes forever to boot. It really yearns for something as fast and simple as Chrome OS. I think Chrome OS is going to redefine the netbook as we know it.
(Comments wont nest below this level)I have successfully compiled the ChromeOS and then converted the image to vdi and used it in my VirtualBox.
So, it works like a live CD.
And no installation is needed – It just comes up.
And there is nothing other than the browser!
So, I don’t know why it should occupy so much space, just to bring up the browser.
If ChromeOS is having nothing other than the browser, then we can have the same browser on any other OS.
What is there other than browser in Chrome OS!?
I don’t see any development tools such as a terminal, compiler, etc.
In that case, how to use this OS for development?
-Narendra
You can open a terminal window with Ctrl+Alt+T. Much of the disk image is empty space if you check the file system from the terminal window. I don’t think a compiler is included, so you really need to perform the development on the machine you use to compile it.
Hello Jorge,
Thanks a ton. My dead netbook just came back to life
It works perfectly on Asus EEE PC.
Do you intend to update the version, if yes, where can I check for the updates.
Thanks Again!
Imi
I’ll probably post an update to my blog (GeekLad) in a few days. I’m working on a shell script to simplify compiling it on a Ubuntu system, which will make it a bit easier for others to compile it as well.
One question: how can we trust that when we type our Google credentials into an image that you made that you’re not sniffing them and sending them to Russian spam bots?
@SL
Trust is always something given, it cannot be demanded or proven. Trust is a choice *you* make.
It can, however, be avoided – if necessary create a new google account just for use with this image & don’t bother reading the emails ever.
Wow, I couldn’t have said it any better myself.
@SL You have my assurance I am not sending login credentials or email addresses anywhere. However, if you still distrust the image, you may wish to take imma’s suggestion and just set up a new Google account for testing it.
(Comments wont nest below this level)ps: any particular reason it was Russion spam bots, or was that just an example?
Thanks for posting this! My Asus EEEPC 900A booted up fine. After I entered the key for my wireless router, it’s connected smoothly to the internet every time.
Can’t get the installer running in Win7 (Home Premium OEM). Tried compatibility modes (vista,xp) and as Admin… nada.
Any thoughts?
You could submit a question to Image Writer support indicating you are having problems using the app in Win7.
Submitted
We’ll see. Just figured there’d be somebody else running Win7 here that might’ve encountered the same. I’ll post if they get a workthrough.
(Comments wont nest below this level)Typing this from Chrome OS running off my flash drive on my Dell 9400/E1705.
Ethernet works, WiFi works (Intel 4965AGN), sound works. =)
@Xander installer was fine on w7 for me, think it might need to be readable by windows though, try formating the flash drive as fat32 first.