Kernel issues: booting from USB storage
Hi
Just to give a little background, after 3 years of running Gentoo (and
SuSE previously,) I have given up due to the impossible maintenance
burden and am migrating back to a binary distribution. Having sworn off
RPMs for life, I have chosen Debian as the most mature and mainstream
distro.
To minimise disruption, I have been doing the installation on a new and
larger hard disc connected to the machine (ThinkPad Z61m) via a
USB-to-SATA adapter. Most of the software installation I have done so
far was done chrooted from my Gentoo system.
All has gone well so far, but I am experiencing issues trying to boot
the external disc with anything but the Debian stock kernel. Here are
the facts:
* I am booting from Grub on the internal disc.
* With the Debian kernel, the external disc boots fine.
* I cannot use the stock kernel for long as, due to poor hardware
design, this machine needs the THINKPAD_ACPI kernel module so that I can
manually run the fan at full speed. (Otherwise I get lockups.)
* I have a requirement to use 2.6.24-r7 (this is the kernel for which
the latest stable realtime patches are available.)
* Whilst I have configured the kernel with SCSI, SATA and USB
Mass-storage compiled in, /dev/sdb2 (which works with the Debian kernel)
cannot be found. It can, however, see the partitions on the internal
SATA disc.
* An attempt at using the kernel with initrd (using kernel-package) got
the boot a little further along but this time it froze at the point that
is said it was connecting to sdb.
* I have copied my (working) Gentoo kernel configuration over, built and
installed and still get the device not found error.
In case it is of any help, here are the outputs of lspci and the
contents of /proc/bus/usb/devices, when booted with the Debian stock kernel:
http://www.smiffysplace.com/files/debian_thinkpad_lspci
http://www.smiffysplace.com/files/debian_thinkpad_usb_devices
...and the .config of the kernel which works not:
http://www.smiffysplace.com/files/debian_thinkpad_kernel_config
(Think that's my latest one, tried so many times!)
In a word, help! I've never had an issue like this before except when
I've forgotten to include an essential kernel module - but I can't see
what I could have missed. (Then again, I've never tried booting from an
external device before - but the stock kernel can do it!)
Cheers
M
--
Matthew Smith
Smiffytech - Technology Consulting & Web Application Development
Business: http://www.smiffytech.com/
Blog/personal: http://www.smiffysplace.com/
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/smiffy
Skype: msmiffy
Twitter: @smiffytech
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