Install the A2 on a bootable USB/SD card

The simplest way to install the A2 directly on physical hardware (or on VMWare, KVM/ProxMox, etc) is by using the A2 ISO Installer.

However, sometimes the ISO installer, which runs a trimmed down version of Linux (TinyCore), does not support some of the local physical hardware on your server. In these cases, you can use this alternative approach to install the A2.

The following steps will guide you through installing the A2 to a USB thumb drive, or SD card which can be used to boot your server to the A2. You can also use this process to install the A2 directly on your local server's disks.

1) ​Download the latest compressed A2 image.

2) Once downloaded, use 7-zip to extract the contents to a local folder. ​ There should be a single large file that is the "raw image" for the A2. You will write this large image file directly to your USB/SD storage. You must have at least 64GB of capacity on the disk.

3) Using any image writing utility such as Win32DiskImager, or Etcher.io on Windows, copy the image file to your USB.

4) Once completed, you can use this USB/SD to boot your physical server and run your A2. If all goes well, you should be greeted by the A2's console menu which you can use to complete your A2 installation, configure backup storage, etc.

Optional Steps to install to local storage

It is entirely possible to run your A2 off of USB or SD storage permanently. This is largely due to the A2's design, where all performance sensitive operations are run either directly out of memory, or on a high speed RAM drive. However, to install the A2 to your storage is simple:

From the A2 console menu, just select the Advanced options, then Clone A2 Image to local drive, as shown below.