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| I would like to run root off a firewire disk |
| Yes, Firewire's cool |
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75% |
[ 3 ] |
| No, I don't have a Firewire disk |
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25% |
[ 1 ] |
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| Total Votes : 4 |
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Message |
danno
n00b
Joined: 18 Jun 2002
Posts: 10
Location: Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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 Posted: Thu Jun 20, 2002 5:55 pm Post subject: Gentoo on a LaCie firewire drive |
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Hey out there. I just came upon an idea that for some reason I hadn't already thought of. The goal is to get gentoo started with root on a LaCie firewire disk attached to my iBook.
I've already gotten yaboot to load an initrd disk image from the internal hard drive, so I think I might try to make a BusyBox(www.busybox.net) image with a linuxrc file that looks something like this:
#!/bin/sh
# Load 1394 drivers
modprobe ieee1394
modprobe ohci1394
modprobe sbp2
mkdir /newroot
mount -o ro /dev/sda9 /newroot
cd /newroot
pivot_root . initrd
exec chroot . /sbin/init dev/console 2>&1
as the stock gentoo kernel doesn't work with my gentoo disk I need to cross-compile it from an intel gentoo box.
Has anyone done something like this before, and if so, do you have any suggestions? |
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Gerk
Retired Dev
Joined: 07 May 2002
Posts: 435
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| Posted: Thu Jun 20, 2002 6:18 pm Post subject: |
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Should be acheivable in theory.. you may not have to go to big extremes to do it either...
Try grabbing a kernel from http://ppckernel.org, I think most have the support you need built in or available as modules. If thats the case then it should be fairly simple to do the rest of the gentoo process, as long as you can initially see that drive with the installer.. you may have to do some tricky footwork and make a temp yaboot/bootstrap to boot the cdrom with your desired kernel. Looking at the yaboot.conf on the ISO may help this process.
I would be interested to hear if you pull it off 
Gerk |
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danno
n00b
Joined: 18 Jun 2002
Posts: 10
Location: Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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| Posted: Fri Jun 21, 2002 4:06 am Post subject: |
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| Gerk wrote: |
I would be interested to hear if you pull it off
Gerk |
Took me an evening... but I did it. I got the BenH iBook kernel, and used its modules in the stock CD initrd.img file which I modified on my PC. I then installed the stage3 tarball which you made.
From there I modified the initrd image again. This time I had a linuxrc script on it:
---
#!/bin/sh
PATH=/bin:/sbin
insmod ieee1394
insmod ohci1394
echo "Press enter when 1394 drive attached"
read DAN
insmod sbp2
---
It isn't problem free, but it works. The system is started by reading yaboot off the MacOS X partition on the internal disk, using open firmware. And the drive can't be attached when the system starts. Why, I don't know. |
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BCarver
n00b
Joined: 02 Jul 2002
Posts: 1
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| Posted: Tue Jul 09, 2002 12:01 am Post subject: Is this possible on a PC? |
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I have a Compaq laptop and an external firewire hard drive. Right now I am running Gentoo on a seperate partition of my laptop's hard drive, but I am very interested in running it off of the firewire drive. Is it possible to use the same procedure you followed with a PC?
Ben |
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danno
n00b
Joined: 18 Jun 2002
Posts: 10
Location: Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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| Posted: Fri Jul 19, 2002 10:33 pm Post subject: Re: Is this possible on a PC? |
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| BCarver wrote: | I have a Compaq laptop and an external firewire hard drive. Right now I am running Gentoo on a seperate partition of my laptop's hard drive, but I am very interested in running it off of the firewire drive. Is it possible to use the same procedure you followed with a PC?
Ben |
The PC's bios isn't capable of booting off Firewire.
You could do something like this though:
1. have a small (10-20mb) /boot partition on your internal hard drive.
2. within said hard drive, have a ramdisk and kernel similar to above
3. have grub do a boot menu off the /boot partition.
done. That MAY work, I have not tried this on my PC. |
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