booting s10 from usb hd, anybody?
 

hi,

happy july 4th! land of the free and the brave - that's why we use slackware, isn't it!

let's get it started before firework runs out!

i pulled the hard disk out and hooked up the cd rom and a portable usb hard disk (western digital 80 g) to a desktop pc and booted the machine up with s10 iso cd. why? i plan to get s10 installed on the usb hd and then move the usb hd to a vpr matrix laptop which supports booting from usb hd and i will be able to boot the laptop into s10 (with usb hd as the 1st booting hd) or boot into m$ XP as shipped.

it all goes well, s10 has no problem in finding the usb hd, cfdisk - /sda1 for root (/) and a bunch partitions, then setup and everything works.

time to move the hd to the laptop and F2 into bios setting to set boot from the usb hd - bios identifies the usb hd correctly. even get as fas as bringing up the lovely linux penguin log. s10 find the REGULAR hd BUT NOT the usb hd. it goes on to display
kenel panic unable to mount root fs ...

try again at boot prompt using
"Linux root=/dev/sda1"
get the same error

recompile the kernel with a bunch of try-and-error and end up the same error.

i suspect all is fine - even the out-of box s10 installation and the problem PROBABLY is that s10 DOES NOT reconganize usb hd at boot - maybe it will take a while to probe (is SLEEP a solution) or has to LOAD some modules before hand - ie before the os kicks in (catch 22, isn't it? os has to be up running before it can load modules - right?, but os is on the usb hd that requires modules to be loaded first). since i really don't know how os and loader work there is a good chance that i am all wrong. nevertheless could you tell me what to do to get s10 boot from an usb hd.

thank you very much!

kayaker

You should compile the drivers directly into the kernel and not as modules, i guess that should do the trick.

thanks.

u r probably right. once the usb support is compiled into kernel 2.6 and after lilo lilo.conf, the entire booting process seems to move a step forward! now the system hangs at probing the usb hd and since the usb hd disk did not get reconganized in time before root=/dev/sda1 was executed so the booting was never completed.

is there anything i can put in lilo.conf (or anthing else i can do) to make sure the usb hd is reconganized before root=/dev/sda1 was executed?

it looks like i am getting very close to the door of a truly portable slackware installation - not the live CD nor the "mini" one. many thanks in advance.

kayaker

Sounds like you still didn't get all the usb support compiled in. Have you tried using the ZipSlack kernel? It has support for usb and scsi compiled in and may just work for you.
You could also use a RUNT Linux(Slackware9.1) bootdisk to get into your machine.

you might be right.

i have enabled all the options for usb storage and i still have the same problem. there must be some other modules i missed out.

what puzzles me is the initrd.img from s10 is ABLE to detect the usb hd and allows me to mount the disk. that leads me thinking that the problem will be solved if there is a way to find out what was "compiled" into s10's initrd.img. how do i do that?

kayaker

ps, the laptop actually boots up with initrd.img but then s10 goes on into installing the system. perhaps another way to boot from the usb hd is to build an initrd.img that is CAPABLE of reconganizing the usb hd and loading the root=/dev/sda1. although i still need to know what is in s10's initrd.img - please help.

The initrd is only the file system.
USB support can be loaded as a module, but that won't work if you want to boot from USB or mount your root file system on USB. The USB support must be compiled INTO the kernel and not as a module.
You also need to compile in SCSI support and initial usbfs support, uhci, ohci
The RUNT bootdisk does exactly what you suggest. it mounts an initrd which loads the modules for USB and continues functioning as a regular Slack boot disk. But REAL SLackware bootdisks do NOT do this.
Have you tried the ZipSlack kernel?

Some mentioned RUNT so i went to see what i was. I found that it has a very good explanation on how to make your own initrd so you can load the USB device and the lilo can boot from it:
http://www.ncsu.edu/resnet/runt/source.html
It's not hard to make and i'm sure it'll work :)

i have a laptop without floppy or cdrom (ibm x31) ... and i had to install everything over an usb drive.

this is how i did it: http://www.php.co.ba/X31/slackkernel.html

M.

I've just realized that SystemRescue CD allows you to boot from a usb hd, the link to their homepage: http://www.sysresccd.org/