[Voyage-linux] Can't boot from USB flash drive

[Danny Adair]

Thanks Punky,

Apparently I was a bit naive when I posted the question.

Here's what I did so far - I guess grub/lilo is a matter of taste; I'm
 more comfortable with grub:

- Recompile the voyage Kernel with USB / USB storage / SCSI support
built-in instead of modules.
- Create a grub partition (sda1) with the kernel image in it so that
it doesn't sit outside BIOS boundaries.
- chroot into voyage and dpkg --purge lilo
- Manually change voyage.update: a) change the hardcoded "1" to a "2"
(voyage goes on sda2) b) comment out the call to lilo_update() as
there is no lilo anymore.
- grub needs a "rootdelay" parameter when loading the kernel, so that
there is enough time for the USB/SCSI drivers to detect the USB key so
that sda2 can be mounted to /.

However, :-)
I haven't got it working yet.
I'll keep you up-to-date. Firstly I _need_ this working, and secondly
I _need_ this documented anyway, so I'll post a HowTo here once I'm
done.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Small_Footprint_Gentoo_on_USB#Create_a_useable_kernel
mentions re: 2.6 Kernel that he left the USB support outside as
modules and then used "preload" on an initrd. I'll investigate that
today.

Btw, on this Phoenix Award BIOS not only did I need to put "USB-HDD"
as the first boot device, I also had to enable "USB Keyboard Support"
to be able to boot from the key.

Cheers,
Danny

On 5/17/06, Kim-man Punky TSE <punkytse at punknix.com> wrote:
> Hi Danny,
>
> See this thread, just talk about it yesterday. ;-)
>     http://list.voyage.hk/pipermail/voyage-linux/2006-May/000898.html
>
> But I am not sure you can boot from USB successfully.  If you have
> successful experience on boot voyage from USB, please share with us.
>
> - Punky
>
> Danny Adair wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I installed a plain vanilla voyage-0.2 on a usb flash drive on sda
> > (sda1 is ext2) on my host.
> > When I boot from it (on the target computer) I get:
> >
> > VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
> > Freeing unused kernel memory: 140k freed
> > Warning: unable to open an initial console.
> > Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found.   Try passing init= option
> > to the kernel
> >
> > I also see that hda was detected. The target computer has a hard disk
> > but I don't want to use it at all. I want to boot and work only off
> > the usb key.
> >
> > README says:
> > 4.4 Known Issues ======================
> > - There is a problem reported when installing voyage over usb device
> > using ub kernel module. Moreover, it is assumed that voyage is
> > installed in /dev/hda1 of the target platform.
> >
> > Any ideas? I couldn't find the problem report in the archives.
> > I suspect that LILO needs to be configured differently but a) I don't
> > know much about lilo and b) there is /etc/lilo.conf
> > /etc/lilo.conf.voyage and /etc/lilo.install.conf and I don't know
> > which one to change.
> >
> > I changed hda to sda and hda1 to sda1 on all of them but to no avail.
> > I appreciate any help.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Danny
> > danny at adair.net
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Voyage-linux mailing list
> > Voyage-linux at list.voyage.hk
> > http://list.voyage.hk/mailman/listinfo/voyage-linux
>
>
> --
> Regards,
> Punky
>
> P U N K N ! X  . c o m
> Technology + Lifestyle
> (http://www.punknix.com)
>
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>
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