Arch Linux

civ247

Member

Registered: 2005-08-05

Posts: 53

mkinitcpio & usb boot

I have been running arch off my 40GB external hard drive for about two years now which has worked fine.

The upgrade to mkinitcpio broke it.

"Failed to parse block device name for "/dev/sda1"" - and everything goes downhill after that.

- menu.lst has been properly updated and boots the new image(s)
- i tried auto, fallback and doing my own

First of all sorry about the huge post & multiple questions but i wont get online again till later or tomorrow so i have to get it all in.

If necessary ill post menu.lst, mkinitxpio.conf etc, but i see no point untill someone actually tells me that usb boot should actually work.

Q1) Does mkinitcpio support external drives??

pause=y should allow me to pause the boot process and drop to a shell right? I got this to work once - i wasnt sure which key you press to pause it so i pressed p,y,delete, enter and ESC keys pretty much all at the same time and it worked, unfortunately i cant get it to work again.

Q2) whick key do i press to drop to a shell?

When i dropped to a shell the first time i did echo /dev/* to display contents of /dev.
Theres lots of stuff but no sdx anything.

Q3) Does this mean anything?? Should sdx be there?

Q4) What about the fact that ide now runs PATA and should appear as an sdx device as well? or did i misunderstand?

In grub i point root to sda1. i have a second boot option that points to sdb1 in case theres a pen drive plugged in or something. this always worked so far. I could run arch off any pc that supported usb boot.

Before i always had a udev rule which created a file in /dev which pointed to external device. This was necessary to allow the install to boot properly even if a different naming scheme was used.

Q5) How does udev in the mkinicpio image relate to the installed udev? Will extra rules in rules.d folder be included?

Thanks!! Any help/ideas appreciated!

Sigi

Member

From: Thurgau, Switzerland

Registered: 2005-09-22

Posts: 1,131

Re: mkinitcpio & usb boot

You could try to make a new initcpio image and replace pata with ide in HOOKS. (Sorry for the short answer)

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Haven't been here in a while. Still rocking Arch.