Booting from USB CDROM

klarnox · Posted: Tue Jan 28, 2003 3:37 am Post subject: Booting from USB CDROM

I have a system with a USB CDROM drive (BIOS supports bootable CDs from USB drive) and no floppy drive (I could attach one temporarily if that is the only way to get this to work). When I boot from the gentoo LiveCD it boots and loads however when it trys to mount the CDROM drive I get an error, which I expected to happen. Anyway the error message is as follows:

mount: Mounting /newroot/dev/cdroms/* on /newroot/mnt/cdrom
failed: No such file or directory
---- CD not found
umount: /newroot: Device or resource busy

So, my question is how do I boot so I have access to my USB CDROM drive? Is it even possible?

I'm pretty new to linux in general however I did manage to stumble my way through installing gentoo on my Dell laptop... My point being please keep answers fairly simple.

yokem55 · Guru Joined: 18 Apr 2002 Posts: 360 Location: Oregon

Hmmm.....I don't have experience with this hardware, so I'm kind of shooting in the dark. I'm thinking you may need to use the usb-mass storage driver. To load it type:

modprobe usb-storage

You then may want to try loading the ide-scsi and scsi cdrom modules since the usb-mass storage driver uses the scsi protocol. Load this with:

modprobe ide-scsi
modprobe sr_mod

Now, if this worked, your cdrom device will be called /dev/sr0 which you can mount as you would a cdrom with

mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/cdrom -t iso9660 -o ro

Hope this at least gives you some ideas to try.

klarnox · Posted: Wed Jan 29, 2003 1:12 am Post subject:

I tried doing a modprobe usb-storage (and ide-scsi and sr_mod) and I get:
insmod: /lib/modules/2.4.20-xfs_pre2: No such file or directory
insmod: /lib/modules: No such file or directory
insmod: usb-storage.o: no module by that name found

I get the same message for the other two as well (replacing usb-storage.o with ide-scsi.o and sr_mod.o for the other modules).

Any other suggestions?

pilla · Posted: Wed Jan 29, 2003 2:24 am Post subject:

You cannot access the CD media before loading the drivers, I guess. It is like an egg and chicken problem.

A possible solution is to use a Knoppix or a Red Hat (or whatever you have that can boot and mount your CD drive) to boot. Then, you may partition your disk, make the filesystems and then untar a tarball into your new gentoo partition.

From that point, you can chroot and proceed with a normal install.
_________________
"I'm just very selective about the reality I choose to accept." -- Calvin

klarnox · Posted: Fri Jan 31, 2003 2:47 pm Post subject:

Well, I haven't found any linux related bootable CD that will properly boot and setup my usb cdrom drive. I've pulled my case apart and have temporarily attached a cdrom drive I borrowed from a friend.

I figure once I have the system running I should be able to get the usb drive working correctly, and hopefully I won't have to reinstall for a long time.