Re: Sarge boots from external firewire drive

["Jonathan D. Bowman" <jonathan.bowman@emu.edu>]

Rough summary:

I had to start on my internal hard drive, install a base system, mount my
firewire drive, go to runlevel 1 and copy the filesystem onto the new
drive, recreate mount points like /proc and /sys, and edit the new fstab.

Then, I create a new initrd image.  I edit /etc/mkinitrd/mkinitrd.conf
with the new root device (/dev/sda3 in my case), and add ieee1394 and
ohci1394 (in that order) to /etc/mkinitrd/modules. Do not worry, mkinitrd
will find sbp2 and sd_mod.

Here is the part that took me days to figure out: the system needs time to
"see" the firewire drive.  On my Powerbook G4, it needed four seconds.
Here's how: add "/bin/sleep" to /etc/mkinitrd/exe and put a script in
/etc/mkinitrd/exe that has this command:

echo -e "sleep 4 \n" >> $INITRDDIR/loadmodules

(I tried two seconds first, and it was not long enough. YMMV)

use mkinitrd to create a new initrd (and edit yaboot.conf accordingly) or
enter the following command:

apt-get install --reinstall kernel-image-2.6.8-powerpc

Now you need a good yaboot.conf.  Here is my image section:

image=/boot/vmlinux
	label=Linux
	device=fw/node/sbp-2/disk@0:
	root=/dev/sda3
	partition=3
	read-only
	initrd=/boot/initrd.img

Note that I have only one Firewire drive, so I could use the short
notation.  Otherwise, you may need to use the exact entry.  You can find
this by using:

find /proc/device-tree/ -name disk@* -printf %P | grep firewire

I think that is about all of it.  Everything is straightforward, except
that "sleep 4" hack.

Hope this helps some people. I am one who does not have hard drive space
for two systems, and I usually use OS X on the road.  Having Linux on the
external is wonderful.

Thanks,
Jonathan Bowman

> In the meantime, could you please post a summary of how you did it to
> the debian-powerpc list, so it will be in the archives?  Thanks.
>
> --
> Eric C. Cooper          e c c @ c m u . e d u
>