On Tuesday 21 September 2010 07:35:13 Jake Moe wrote: > On 16/09/10 21:30, J. Roeleveld wrote:
<snipped old stuff> > > Please bear in mind, I have not actually used nor needed a ramdisk to > > boot from ever since I started using Gentoo. > > Not even when I played with booting from USB-sticks myself. > > I simply build the kernel with all the necessary drivers compiled-in and > > used that to boot from. > > > > This might also be an idea for you? > > > > -- > > Joost > > > > Eg. if you do the mknod-commands to build the /dev/sda, /dev/sda1,.... > > device nodes, then it should be able to continue. > > Well, I've finally gotten this to work with a manually config'ed > kernel. Before, I was only getting kernel panics. Now, after your > comment "all compiled-in", I took the old config I tried, did a sed to > change all "=m" to "=y", and recompiled, and it worked. So obviously, > there was some option that I wasn't building into the kernel (only as a > module) that was needed to start from USB. That's generally a good way to start, stick everything in the kernel :) > I had previously started from a working config I had previously used for > the same model PC that I was doing my testing on, and just changed the > USB drivers from modules to built-in, but apparently that's not enough. > Any ideas what else is needed for a USB-stick boot that's not needed in > a SATA boot? I'd like to a) find out what I missed, and b) be able to > cull the kernel back down again, so I can build up lots of SATA, > graphics and audio modules to make this able to boot (and work properly) > on other systems. Ok, doing this from memory here. To be able to boot from USB, you need (additionally to what you normally have): 1) USB Host drivers (OHCI,UHCI,EHCI,...) 2) USB Mass Storage 3) file system on the USB-stick 4) SCSI-disk (USB Mass storage depends on this) If others can also have a quick look on this list to check that I didn't miss anything? -- Joost
