Hi all,

A brief intro.
I recently got an HP tablet (Pavilion tx2500z) that came pre-loaded with Vista Home Premium 32 bit. I don't really like using Vista so much, though, and I wanted to get used to Linux. I'm pretty much a n00b, my only experience with it having been a brief tryst with Ubuntu last summer. The thing is, I need Vista (at least for now) for classwork and the like (I'm in my first year of undergrad) until I'm good enough with Slackware and WINE that I can use them comfortably. So I got a 4GB USB flash drive and decided to install Slackware on it. I used the small Slackware packages listed here with some additions - some extra packages in AP, all of L, all of X, and most of XAP. I didn't pass any extra parameters to hugesmp.s.

The installation went off smoothly - it took me a few attempts to get the partitions right (about 1GB for /, about 1GB for /home, and about 2GB for /usr, filesystem ext2 on all of them), but it went pretty well. I toggled the bootable flag on / in fdisk and used the default simple install for Lilo. The USB drive was /dev/sdb, the partitions being /dev/sdb1-3 in the order listed above.

When I rebooted from the USB drive (I'd set it to boot from CD drive, then USB, then HDD), Lilo loaded up and I chose Linux. It started loading it up, and text started scrolling down. It stopped, saying that it could not boot from the root drive, and that I needed to pass the parameter "root=" properly. It listed as my options the drives from my HDD (/dev/sda1-2), but my flash drive was not listed at all. After that, it was written "kernel panic - unable to load root", or something along those lines. I remember the "kernel panic" part, but I can't recall the rest of the error message.

So my question - how do I get this working? Also, how do I get the flash drive to mount with the relatime option enabled? I recall reading that relatime was the best balance between atime and noatime as far as lifespan of the drive and speed of operations went. Any help would be much appreciated.

At the lilo screen, after selecting Linux, just type "root=/dev/sdb1" - without quotes.

Thanks for the quick response, much appreciated. I tried that, but it didn't work, I got the same thing. Tried it with root=/sda1, and it seemed to get past that stage. Now it's asking me for init= parameters, and I'm not really sure what to do. Sorry to be such a pain, but once again, any help would be appreciated.

The init parameters you are looking for are read-only mate.

init=ro

I tried init=ro and rdinit=ro (dunno why, really, I saw it mentioned while booting from the install disk), but neither work. with init=ro, it says something like "unable to load ro, attempting defaults...". The next line says "kernel panic - unable to sync." Then it tells me to pass an init= option to the kernel...which I did. I don't know what I'm doing wrong here...

I maybe mistaken here but I seem to recall that when booting off a USB device you needed to use the rootdelay kernel option.
Something like this at the lilo prompt: hugesmp.s root=/dev/sdb1 rootdelay=10
As far as how to enable relatime once you get your system booted edit /etc/fstab and add relatime to the mount points you want.
Example: /dev/sdb1 / ext3 defaults,relatime 1 1
Next time you boot it will boot with relatime.

I am also trying to install Slack 12.2 on a USB and up to now I am getting kernel panic as well. I tried the huge kernel, generic + mkinitrd c/w USB modules, but no progress yet. I failed to find any helpfull documentation but the Alien Bob wiki seems to indicate that he had managed but then it seems to be a works in progress. My impression is that this is not a tivial task, yet there is an easy method to install SLAX on a FAT USB if that is good enough for you.

Chris

Please, no more tears. Just follow the link below for some light reading..

http://linuxconfig.dyndns.org:1184/l...vable_USB_disk

Thanks very much, everyone! rootdelay=10 seems to have gotten it working. It boots now, so I'm happy.

Um, one last question - how do I enable gui? It boots into command line, but I've installed X and I'd like to enable xfce if I can. Sorry if this is off-topic, I was just wondering.

Thanks again

After login:

startxfce4

If you want it to boot into a GUI login then edit /etc/inittab and change:

# Default runlevel. (Do not set to 0 or 6)
id:3:initdefault:

to:

# Default runlevel. (Do not set to 0 or 6)
id:4:initdefault:

Thanks again!