Hi James
I'm using OpenFirmware Q7B26  EC Firmware 0.4.03

I have tried turning the "boot" flag off on the NTFS partition, but it still dumps me to the OpenFirmware ok prompt.

I can reproduce the problem by formatting a USB stick to NTFS and trying to boot with it plugged in.

So it is reacting badly to the mere presence of NTFS on USB media.

-braddock

On 05/12/2013 03:40 PM, James Cameron wrote:
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 03:44:18PM -0400, Holt wrote:
Is there a way to boot a large USB hard drive attached to an XO?
At our XS Community Sprint this week outside Toronto, we've been
unable to boot XOs with the 700+ GB drive(s) containing very
polished open content provided by http://internet-in-a-box.org
The XOs (eg. XO-4 etc) refuse to auto-boot, leaving the screen at
the OK prompt.

FYI our 1TB disk is a nearly complete snapshot of:
* Wikipedia-in-41-languages, thumbnails for most all images
* OpenStreetMap for the whole world cached at all zoom levels for
fast display
* Gutenberg Prjct's full collection of 40,000+ books, images
* Khan Academy's ~4000 video classes, etc

Does firmware currently block the mounting of all large USB drives
-- NTFS in this case if not other filesystems?
Open Firmware tries the first partition that is marked bootable.

Exactly what it does next depends on the firmware version, but clearly
in your case it stops booting.

Might there be a workaround so isolated XO servers in Haiti (etc!)
can hopefully auto-boot with this quality free content?
Turn off the bootable flag using a partitioning program, ensure you
are using latest firmware Q7B30, and attach a serial console for
further debugging.

If you can tell me how to reproduce the symptom, then I'm quite sure I
can get it fixed.  I certainly can't afford to download 700 GB or 1 TB
to do that though.

I'm happy to work with whoever has the drive and an XO-4.

The nature and value of the content has no relationship to the
diagnosis process, but is interesting regardless.


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