Re: success story and RFC: boot debian powerpc from external firewire hd without messing with initrd image

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Fri, Nov 25, 2005 at 12:23:22AM +0100, dllm70-boborosso@yahoo.com wrote:
> I succesfully booted debian on my v.2 powerbook
> titanium from an
> external firewire disk (a maxtor one touch), without
> having to mess
> with an initrd kernel.
> 
> The procedure uses the etch beta installer (sarge
> installer didn't recognize the firewire disk) and is
> described in (excessive?) detail at my under
> construction site
> 
> http://www.boborosso.com
> 
> In brief: kernel must be >= 2.6.12 to recognize the
> rootdelay option configured with disable the RAM disk
> support
> option (found in Device Drivers -> Block devices).

Notice that using any kernel older than 2.6.14 for firewire disk usage is kin
to bring only disaster, as it consistently died when doing larger firewire
disk transfers. 2.6.14 is fixed in that aspect. Not sure if yaird |
initramfs-tools will help here.

> Configuration options that must be compiled-in, that
> is enabled but NOT
> marked as modules:
> 
>     * Device Drivers -> SCSI Device support:
>           o SCSI device support
>           o SCSI disk support
>           o SCSI generic support
>           o Powermac external and internal SCSI
> support (among SCSI low
> level drivers)
>     * Device Drivers ->IEEE1394 (Firewire) support:
>           o Raw IEEE1394 I/O support
>           o OHCI-1394 support
>           o SBP-2 support
>       and, maybe unnecessarily,
>           o OUI Database
>           o Build in extra config
>           o IP-1394 Entry
>     * File Systems: the support for the filesystem
> that is going to be
> used on the firewire drive, (i use XFS), must be
> compiled-in. Others can
> be kept as modules.

Ah, so you compile your own kernel to make it work, hardly the best way. What
you need is firewire support in yaird|initramfs-tools.

> The resulting kernel will not use initrd, so do not
> use the --initrd
> option when issuing the make-kpkg command.
> 
> The installer will fail when trying to install yaboot.

Can you file a bug report against yaboot-installer with this ? 

Friendly,

Sven Luther