How to boot bare metal on actual hardware?

[RaymiiOrg]

I've compiled a Vi clone (https://raymii.org/s/blog/Bare_Metal_Boot_to_Vi.html) with cosmopolitan, which works on Linux and QEMU. I want to run that on actual hardware, but I'm not sure how to proceed. I've tried dd-ing the image to an USB drive, which did not show up in my BIOS boot menu. I also wrote the image to an actual floppy drive using dd and tried to boot, again did not show up in my BIOS boot menu. I don't have access to an UEFI enabled machine. Are there instructions available to run a compiled executable on actual hardware, not QEMU?

[tkchia]

Hello @RaymiiOrg,

dd-ing should work. Are you able to get one of the example programs in example/ to run on an actual machine? Try e.g.

sudo dd if=o//examples/vga.com of=/dev/sdX conv=notrunc

(replace /dev/sdX with your device's name) and then reboot with the USB drive.

If vga.com runs but vi.com does not run, then perhaps the issue was in how vi.com was built. If vga.com does not run on your machine either, then that is very strange. But maybe try booting vga.com first.

(Anyway, Cosmopolitan's bare metal support defaults to only supporting legacy BIOS machines actually. You need extra steps in your program to support UEFI machines — take a look at examples/vga2.c.)

Thank you!