Re: [gentoo-user] problem booting from a USB flash drive
On 6/10/05, Neil Bothwick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 01:28:40 -0400, Colin wrote: Probably. You can save space with a compressed filesystem like jjfs or squashfs. You probably want to mount it read only since flash has limited write cycles. Kind of off on a tangent, but there are other alternatives to a write-protected file system. Instead of using a USB flash disk, there are IDE-CompactFlash adapters that would achieve the same result but with 100% IDE compatibility, so the disk just shows up as /dev/hd[x] like a normal hard drive and doesn't require any rootdelaying or USB drivers. I don't know if CF cards are lockable, I know SD's are. CF cards aren't lockable, but some CD-IDE adaptors have a write protect jumper. Of course, you'll have problems saving any settings with a write- protected /etc, so JFFS2 may be a better option. This is a filesystem specifically for flash driver, that avoids repeated writing to the same part of the disk. For me this is about how to make a quiet MythTV frontend machine, not a 'Gentoo PC.' No hard drive is less noise. My thought was that once the machine was configured I'd like to lock the flash and never write ANYTHING to it. The only time I'd possibly do anything on the flash was to update the system, maybe once every few months. Other than that if the machine is turned on and playing TV shows then I'd be happy with no logging or any type and the drive doesn't change at all. Longer term maybe PXE booting is a better solution but my first attempts at that haven't worked well. This was conceived as an experiment to see if a Pundit-R with nothing more than a processor memory added to it internally could suffice as a Myth frontend using this external flash drive. Thanks -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] problem booting from a USB flash drive
On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 03:59:16 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote: On 6/10/05, Neil Bothwick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: CF cards aren't lockable, but some CD-IDE adaptors have a write protect jumper. Of course, you'll have problems saving any settings with a write- protected /etc, so JFFS2 may be a better option. This is a filesystem specifically for flash driver, that avoids repeated writing to the same part of the disk. Or, of course, you could simply mount the filesystem ro. For me this is about how to make a quiet MythTV frontend machine, not a 'Gentoo PC.' No hard drive is less noise. My thought was that once the machine was configured I'd like to lock the flash and never write ANYTHING to it. What about the MythTV data? Is that on another box, networked? The only time I'd possibly do anything on the flash was to update the system, maybe once every few months. Other than that if the machine is turned on and playing TV shows then I'd be happy with no logging or any type and the drive doesn't change at all. It sounds like you need something like one of these, which keep the card inside the box, and treat it as a hard disk (but silent). Removing all hard disks would also reduce the amount of heat generated, so you could reduce fan speeds to make it even quieter. -- Neil Bothwick If you smoke after sex, you're doing it too fast. pgpEXDa0j8gEO.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] problem booting from a USB flash drive
On 6/10/05, Neil Bothwick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 03:59:16 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote: On 6/10/05, Neil Bothwick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: CF cards aren't lockable, but some CD-IDE adaptors have a write protect jumper. Of course, you'll have problems saving any settings with a write- protected /etc, so JFFS2 may be a better option. This is a filesystem specifically for flash driver, that avoids repeated writing to the same part of the disk. Or, of course, you could simply mount the filesystem ro. Ah, there's always a smart guy out there. ;-) Why didn't I think of that? Good point! There much be a way to do this sort of thing, again because I have the install CD as an example. For me this is about how to make a quiet MythTV frontend machine, not a 'Gentoo PC.' No hard drive is less noise. My thought was that once the machine was configured I'd like to lock the flash and never write ANYTHING to it. What about the MythTV data? Is that on another box, networked? Exactly. We have a server with lots of storage elsewhere on the network. This flash drive machine has no purpose other than playing that MythTV recordings. It's just a single function box. Although the first unit has a DVD drive in it since I had to build Gentoo from a universal CD I figure that long term I don't even need that since the picture playing a DVD from Myth is nowhere near as good as playing for our DVD players. The only time I'd possibly do anything on the flash was to update the system, maybe once every few months. Other than that if the machine is turned on and playing TV shows then I'd be happy with no logging or any type and the drive doesn't change at all. It sounds like you need something like one of these, which keep the card inside the box, and treat it as a hard disk (but silent). More or less. It could be inside or outside. What I sort of liked about the external USB flash drive was the idea that I could possibly learn to build the distro in a chrooted environment on my laptop, for instance, and then write it to multiple flash drives for multiple boxes. I've set this system up here, but I'm also building units for my parents who live 350 miles away. Right now they have a Gentoo backend and an XBox frontend. If a significant rev of Myth or Gentoo came along my thought was I could write it on one of this little guys, test it here, and then send it to my dad with instructions to power down, replace the old flash drive with the new flash drive, boot up, and he's running again. He sends me back the old flash drive and we can go through that process whenever we want. I could also ftp a new version to his Myth backend box with instructions on how he could overwrite the old drive but if somethig goes wrong then the unit doesn't work at all. Another possibility is to skip the flash drive completely, put in a cheap CD and then build essentially a Gentoo LiveCD that boots the system and starts Myth. No hard drive, no flash drive and probably the cheapest solution. Might be more noisy though if the drive continues to spin forever... Maybe there's instructions out there on how to do this sort of thing but I haven't found them yet. Removing all hard disks would also reduce the amount of heat generated, so you could reduce fan speeds to make it even quieter. Exactly my though. I bought the 512MB flash drive for $42 on sale yesterday. If I remove the hard drive and the DVD drive then a Pundit-R comes out at about $275-$300 which is at least reasonable, but still a lot higher than Tivo which sells the hardware at a loss and then makes it up in subscription costs. (Or so I think...) - Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] problem booting from a USB flash drive
On 6/9/05, Zac Medico [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You say the kernel messages indicate that the flash disk was recognized as sda so I'm not sure why it's not mounting for you. I looked through linux/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt and saw a rootdelay parameter. With the modules I need a delay for the usb drivers to initialize. Maybe you need that too. Try rootdelay=5 or rootdelay=10 or something. Zac Great call Zac! rootdelay=10 allowed me to boot from the flash drive just fine. I still get absolutely no [OK] messages but the system comes up, I can log in as root or mythtv. I cannot run mythfrontend yet due to missing libraries and things, but it seems pretty fixable so far. Thanks! It's intersting that rc-update show shows all the right info but it seems that possibly very few of the services are really starting. However I do have networking so that's a start. Thanks for doing the reading! - Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] problem booting from a USB flash drive
--- Mark Knecht [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Great call Zac! rootdelay=10 allowed me to boot from the flash drive Excellent! That's good to know. If you need any help with the PXE I might be able to help with that too since I use pxelinux to boot my diskless node. Zac __ Discover Yahoo! Have fun online with music videos, cool games, IM and more. Check it out! http://discover.yahoo.com/online.html -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] problem booting from a USB flash drive
On 6/10/05, Zac Medico [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- Mark Knecht [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Great call Zac! rootdelay=10 allowed me to boot from the flash drive Excellent! That's good to know. If you need any help with the PXE I might be able to help with that too since I use pxelinux to boot my diskless node. Zac Zac, Thanks. Shall I contact you offline? I tried PXE awhile ago but couldn't get it to work. I'm not sure the old Dell I used as a test box was truly PXE compliant so I was thinking I swhould check out what low cost, Linux-compatible PXE NICs are out there but haven't gotten around to looking yet. I think a pure mythfronteld box could be pretty simple and cheap. So far I've never used more than about 140MB running Myth on this Pundit-R box so I see no reason to go beyond 256MB. PXE would help keep the cost down and the box more quiet. Thanks again, Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] problem booting from a USB flash drive
--- Mark Knecht [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Zac, Thanks. Shall I contact you offline? I tried PXE awhile ago but couldn't get it to work. I'm not sure the old Dell I used as a test box was truly PXE compliant so I was thinking I swhould check out what low cost, Linux-compatible PXE NICs are out there but haven't gotten around to looking yet. I think a pure mythfronteld box could be pretty simple and cheap. So far I've never used more than about 140MB running Myth on this Pundit-R box so I see no reason to go beyond 256MB. PXE would help keep the cost down and the box more quiet. Sure, feel free to contact me offline. Actually I can thank the gentoo docs for helping me to get my diskless node running. I found these ones helpful: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/diskless-howto.xml http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/ltsp.xml Zac __ Discover Yahoo! Have fun online with music videos, cool games, IM and more. Check it out! http://discover.yahoo.com/online.html -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-user] problem booting from a USB flash drive
Hi, Is there anything specific that must be built into a kernel to boot from a USB flash drive? I'm fiddling with my first flash drive to see how well it might work for my Pundit-R MythTV frontend box. (to reduce noise - no hard drive) I've gotten as far as grub starting, choosing the kernel, and the kernel starts booting. It goes cleanly through the first part of the boot, but then it gets to the point where (I think) the kernel is going to start with all of the OK messages. At that point it tells me that there's some kind of a VFS sync problem, or something like that. Now the drive is completely accessible when I boot from my hard drive and mount it from the command line. No modules are required to do this so I assume there is the appropriate stuff in the kernel. Here are the modules loaded when reading the drive: myth11 linux # lsmod Module Size Used by snd_usb_audio 63680 0 snd_usb_lib11520 1 snd_usb_audio snd_rawmidi20640 1 snd_usb_lib snd_atiixp 17120 0 snd_ac97_codec 75384 1 snd_atiixp fglrx 240380 0 agpgart28968 1 fglrx myth11 linux # Here's what I think is the major clue: First, when it fails to boot, it tells me that it cannot find /dev/sda2. Immediately following that it identifies the Maxtor flash drive, see two partitions, and says they are called sda1 and sda2. So, is this some sort of ordering problem? Does the kernel possibly need a boot line config option to tell it to boot from SCSI or something? Thanks in advance, Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] problem booting from a USB flash drive
--- Mark Knecht [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, Is there anything specific that must be built into a kernel to boot from a USB flash drive? I'm fiddling with my first flash drive to see how well it might work for my Pundit-R MythTV frontend box. (to reduce noise - no hard drive) I've gotten as far as grub starting, choosing the kernel, and the kernel starts booting. It goes cleanly through the first part of the boot, but then it gets to the point where (I think) the kernel is going to start with all of the OK messages. At that point it tells me that there's some kind of a VFS sync problem, or something like that. Now the drive is completely accessible when I boot from my hard drive and mount it from the command line. No modules are required to do this so I assume there is the appropriate stuff in the kernel. Here are the modules loaded when reading the drive: myth11 linux # lsmod Module Size Used by snd_usb_audio 63680 0 snd_usb_lib11520 1 snd_usb_audio snd_rawmidi20640 1 snd_usb_lib snd_atiixp 17120 0 snd_ac97_codec 75384 1 snd_atiixp fglrx 240380 0 agpgart28968 1 fglrx myth11 linux # Here's what I think is the major clue: First, when it fails to boot, it tells me that it cannot find /dev/sda2. Immediately following that it identifies the Maxtor flash drive, see two partitions, and says they are called sda1 and sda2. So, is this some sort of ordering problem? Does the kernel possibly need a boot line config option to tell it to boot from SCSI or something? Hi Mark, I boot from a usb hard disk and I don't really have to do anything special. Well, actually I load modules from a genkernel initrd but that doesn't apply here since you built in the drivers. This is the same exact kernel that you were using from the hard drive, right? What's your kernel command line? I assume that the error occurs when the kernel goes to mount the root filesystem. Exact details of that error may be helpful. Zac __ Discover Yahoo! Find restaurants, movies, travel and more fun for the weekend. Check it out! http://discover.yahoo.com/weekend.html -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] problem booting from a USB flash drive
On 6/9/05, Zac Medico [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Mark, I boot from a usb hard disk and I don't really have to do anything special. Well, actually I load modules from a genkernel initrd but that doesn't apply here since you built in the drivers. This is the same exact kernel that you were using from the hard drive, right? What's your kernel command line? I assume that the error occurs when the kernel goes to mount the root filesystem. Exact details of that error may be helpful. Zac Hey Zac - thanks for writing back. Yes, it's the exact same kernel. All I've done is create a couple of partitions on the flash drive, make one a small bootable on the flash drive, copy over the hard drive's boot partition and then start editing the grub.conf file on the flash drive to try and get it to work. Additionally I've created the top level directories on the root partition so that I have boot/root/home/var directories, etc. I'm sure there's better ways to do this but I felt like exploring things a bit instead of just following HOWTO's. I wanted to understand a bit more about what's really needed, etc., to make this work. OK, so I have a grub.conf file that looks like this: When I boot I get this sort of message at the end of the boot: (copied by hand from the screen) VFS: Cannot open root device sda2 or unknown block (0,0) Please append correct root= boot option Kernel panic - not syncing VFS: Unable to mount root on unknown block (0,0) 5 Vendor: Memorex Model: TD 2CRev 1.04 type: Direct access ANSA SCSI revision: 00 SCSI assuming write enabled SCSI assuming drive cache: write through It stricks me as I write this that I know so very little about /dev. I've done nothing to create /dev hoping that it was all done automatically by the boot process with udev. Maybe that's not the case and if not could be a huge problem since there's nothing in /dev on the flash drive at the moment. Anyway, that's where I'm at. I need to go do some reading I think, but if you see something obviously wrong I'd appreciate the pointers. Also, I'm assuming this can be done on a 512MB flash drive since Unversal boot disks aren't much larger, right? thanks, Mark Thanks, Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] problem booting from a USB flash drive
--- Mark Knecht [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes, it's the exact same kernel. All I've done is create a couple of partitions on the flash drive, make one a small bootable on the flash drive, copy over the hard drive's boot partition and then start editing the grub.conf file on the flash drive to try and get it to work. Additionally I've created the top level directories on the root partition so that I have boot/root/home/var directories, etc. I'm sure there's better ways to do this but I felt like exploring things a bit instead of just following HOWTO's. I wanted to understand a bit more about what's really needed, etc., to make this work. OK, so I have a grub.conf file that looks like this: Like what? :P When I boot I get this sort of message at the end of the boot: (copied by hand from the screen) VFS: Cannot open root device sda2 or unknown block (0,0) Please append correct root= boot option Kernel panic - not syncing VFS: Unable to mount root on unknown block (0,0) 5 Vendor: Memorex Model: TD 2CRev 1.04 type: Direct access ANSA SCSI revision: 00 SCSI assuming write enabled SCSI assuming drive cache: write through It stricks me as I write this that I know so very little about /dev. I've done nothing to create /dev hoping that it was all done automatically by the boot process with udev. Maybe that's not the case and if not could be a huge problem since there's nothing in /dev on the flash drive at the moment. Well, you haven't gotten far enough for this to be a problem yet since the root filesystem did not mount. Anyways, it's covered in the udev guide: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/udev-guide.xml Anyway, that's where I'm at. I need to go do some reading I think, but if you see something obviously wrong I'd appreciate the pointers. Also, I'm assuming this can be done on a 512MB flash drive since Unversal boot disks aren't much larger, right? Probably. You can save space with a compressed filesystem like jjfs or squashfs. You probably want to mount it read only since flash has limited write cycles. You say the kernel messages indicate that the flash disk was recognized as sda so I'm not sure why it's not mounting for you. I looked through linux/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt and saw a rootdelay parameter. With the modules I need a delay for the usb drivers to initialize. Maybe you need that too. Try rootdelay=5 or rootdelay=10 or something. Zac __ Discover Yahoo! Use Yahoo! to plan a weekend, have fun online and more. Check it out! http://discover.yahoo.com/ -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] problem booting from a USB flash drive
Zac Medico wrote: Probably. You can save space with a compressed filesystem like jjfs or squashfs. You probably want to mount it read only since flash has limited write cycles. You say the kernel messages indicate that the flash disk was recognized as sda so I'm not sure why it's not mounting for you. I looked through linux/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt and saw a rootdelay parameter. With the modules I need a delay for the usb drivers to initialize. Maybe you need that too. Try rootdelay=5 or rootdelay=10 or something. Kind of off on a tangent, but there are other alternatives to a write-protected file system. Instead of using a USB flash disk, there are IDE-CompactFlash adapters that would achieve the same result but with 100% IDE compatibility, so the disk just shows up as /dev/hd[x] like a normal hard drive and doesn't require any rootdelaying or USB drivers. I don't know if CF cards are lockable, I know SD's are. CF is kind of costly, though, especially if you want faster media. SCSI wouldn't be worth the money here (disks can be write-protected at the hardware level via a jumper), but maybe a nice Ultra160 15 kRPM drive on your back-end server would make a good investment. -- Colin -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
