I'm running Crux 2.8 on an i686 system. When the install media boots, it sees usb media just fine, but now that I've installed/compiled a booting system, it seems to do things more or less ok except mounting USB drives. When I insert the device, it announces normally, shows itself off as sdb1 and usually from that point I can just do:

mount /dev/sdb1 /usb

and it just picks up and goes - that's how it goes from the installer media.

however, now, I get a ton of errors saying it can't detect an ext4 system, a vfat system, or an NTFS system (these are filesystems I have compiled into my kernel) The drive, is infact typically mounted as vfat and on other linux systems - and windows 7 - it works fine.

I'm sure it's something dumb I did in my kernel config, but I've got the scsi / scsi disk / usb mass storage things all checked and built-in in menuconfig.

I have another system based on Crux 3.1 with a custom kernel as well, and that one mounts usb drives just fine, though that's on the 4.2 kernel.

What did I miss?

Note : getting log output here is going to be a pain because I can't cat /var/log/boot > /usb/file.txt and sneaker-net it over like I usually do.

What's dmesg say? Or lsusb?

That'll be exciting to get across here..

I'll have to try again tonight and see what dmesg has to say.

In the interim, I tried building a 4.2 kernel which hangs at "Booting the kernel." But otherwise looks fine

In reference to pre-login errors, and being hung up at something as vague as Booting the kernel, what logs can I check for more verbose output? (I checked /var/log/boot and didn't see much of use in there)

Welp, I lost my kernels and my filesystem...too many things went wrong and I was spending hours producing unusable kernel after unusable kernel.

I did discover this though:

https://agentoss.wordpress.com/2011/...-installation/

specifically, the make i386_defconfig command, isn't something I've seen before, so I used that as a starting point and am recompiling now.

What's really weird/frustrating is it was nearly split down the middle, nearly half of my kernels either wouldn't boot...or they had file-locking issues and everything came up as read-only. These changes would emerge after I'd made seemingly benign changes to the kernel config...but I'm more or less keeping track of what I do now - at this point I need to get back to a kernel that at least boots and figure out what's so magic about that config.

Ok, so this is solved and another...two other issues are found.

The answer here was under generic driver options, two options...seems to me like they should be checked by default but neither were.

Maintain a devtmpfs filesystem to mount at /dev

-and-

Automount devtmpfs at /dev, after the kernel mounted the rootfs

Outside of embedded/industrial applications, I have no idea why these aren't on by default..but they fixed -all- of my read-only filesystem issues for all the obvious reasons