Arch Linux

wuischke

Member

From: Suisse Romande

Registered: 2007-01-06

Posts: 630

Avoid rootdelay with USB root?

Because my internal hdd (RIP) decided to die after only 8 months of usage, I had to switch to an external hdd (my 3 years old hdd from my old notebook) for my root fs.

Unfortunately the timing of the hardware detection is very bad. Sometimes it will recognize the hdd fast enough to boot, but almost always I see the hdd information moments after I was dropped into the ramfs shell. It works with rootdelay=8 (rootdelay=4 didn't work), but it's stupid to wait some 6 seconds only because there's no auto-wait. The hdd has to be ready at this time, because grub is on the same hdd, so it's a driver problem.

So my first thought was to modify the initrd, but honestly I'm a bit lost.

I use no internal hdd, so I shouldn't need any of the following modules anymore, is this correct? (It's an external 2.5'' hdd using IDE) What modules are needed for an external HDD? I take it that they are currently loaded by the USB hook.

MODULES="pata_acpi ata_generic ahci ata_piix"

Which of these hooks are not necessary? I assume I only need base, usb and filesystems (I use ext3) to load the kernel and all the other things can be loaded later?

HOOKS="base udev autodetect pata scsi sata usb usbinput keymap filesystems"

Thanks in advance for your help. I've an OK knowledge about kernel modules, but I was never in a situation to worry about USB.