Hello all, I have recently tried to install Mandrake 9.0 on an external FireWire drive. I was pleasantly surprised to see the installation go smoothly after booting from the installation CD and selecting expert. However after finishing theinstallation, there is no way of booting the system. The problem is the initial ramdisk, which is made incorrectly. It does not even contain the scsi and FireWire modules needed to find the drives and boot the system. After some digging I came up with the solution: It is neccessary to create a custom ramdisk containing the following modules: scsi_mod, sd_mod, ieee1394, ohci1394 and sbp2. Then the custom linuxrc must be made:
<snip> #!/bin/nash echo Mounting /proc filesystem mount -t proc /proc /proc echo "Loading ieee1394 module" insmod /lib/ieee1394.o echo "Loading ohci1394 module" insmod /lib/ohci1394.o echo "Loading scsi_mod module" insmod /lib/scsi_mod.o echo "Loading sd_mod module" insmod /lib/sd_mod.o echo "Loading usb-storage module" insmod /lib/sbp2.o echo scsi add-single-device 0 0 0 0 > /proc/scsi/scsi cat /proc/scsi/scsi echo "Loading reiserfs module" insmod /lib/reiserfs.o echo Creating root device mkrootdev /dev/root echo 0x0100 > /proc/sys/kernel/real-root-dev umount /proc echo Mounting root filesystem with flags notail,noatime mount --ro -t reiserfs /dev/root /sysroot notail,noatime pivot_root /sysroot /sysroot/initrd echo Remounting devfs at correct place if necessary handledevfs </snip> The important part is to mount the /proc filesystem before loading the modules and use the "echo scsi ..." command to tell the controller that the disk is there (it is not auto-detected). With this and the stock MDK 9.0 kernel I was able to create the bootdisk which allowed me to boot MDK 9.0 from the external FireWire drive. Note that similar procedure should be used to install/boot the system from external USB drives. (just replace ieee1394, ohci1394 and sbp2 with usb-core, usb-uhci <or> usb-ohci, usb-storage). I hope this helps people with similar problems. -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Adam Kisiel | e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Faculty of Physics | homepage: www.if.pw.edu.pl/~kisiel Warsaw University Of Technology | --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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