SCSI HDD and SCSI USB - can't boot from USB

[shankargopal]

Found a funny problem with booting Puppy 2.00 on a new HP PC, with a 75 GB NTFS formatted HDD and 256 MB RAM, from a Kingston Data Traveler II+ 1 GB pen drive.

It appears to be a SATA HDD, because when booting my pen drive is detected as sdb (and if I boot off Live CD, I find the hard drive listed as sda, and "cat /proc/scsi/scsi" produces:

Code: Select all

Attached devices:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: ATA      Model: WDC WD800JD-60LS Rev: 07.0
  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 05
Host: scsi2 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: Kingston Model: DataTraveler II+ Rev: 1.13
  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 02

However, if I try to boot from the pen drive, the system starts fine, gets to the point of loading usb-storage and assigning the pen drive to sdb1, and then hangs with a message to the effect of "Kernel panic."

Why is this happening?

I did a look through /initrd/sbin/init and found these comments:

Code: Select all

#sata drive will also cause 'scsi' entry, but such PC likely to be usb2
#so 5 sec above plus 1 sec below is enough for usb-storage drv to respond.

I suspect that this isn't true on this machine and the traditional 25 sec delay may be necessary, though it does seem to be usb2, at least according to USBview. But I can't test it because I don't think there's any way to change initrd.gz - is there?

[niels]

But I can't test it because I don't think there's any way to change initrd.gz - is there?

There is. initrd.gz is just a compressed ext2 filesystem. You can modify it as follows:

mkdir /mnt/init
gunzip initrd.gz
mount -t ext2 -o loop `pwd`/initrd /mnt/init

[modify]

umunt /mnt/init
gzip initrd

I've put a modified version from the 2.00r1 OneBone release that adds a 10 second delay after the USB drivers are loaded.

http://www.weaklogic.com/puppy/initrd.gz

[kuhtreiber]

Fantabulous!
I had the same Kernel Panick message and the new initrd.gz fixed it!
Is there anything missing in this OneBone release initrd.gz as compared to the one from the regular Puppy 2.0 that I should be aware of? In other words, should I add the extra sleep of 10 sec to the regular initrd.gz using the procedure described, or is it all the same?

Thanks !

Wiel

Willem Kuhtreiber

[niels]

There shouldn't be anything missing- however the filesize of the initrd.gz are different so there's a difference somewhere. Note though that OneBone is actually version 2.01, so my guess is that initrd.gz contains a fix that the 2.00 version doesn't. It's only a guess though- I have not compared them.

Glad to hear it works for you though.

[GarboEsq]

But I can't test it because I don't think there's any way to change initrd.gz - is there?

There is. initrd.gz is just a compressed ext2 filesystem. You can modify it as follows:

mkdir /mnt/init
gunzip initrd.gz
mount -t ext2 -o loop `pwd`/initrd /mnt/init

[modify]

umunt /mnt/init
gzip initrd

I've just tried the above mount command under puppy 2.01 and it doesn't work. It gives the following error message -

mount: ioctl: LOOP_SET_FD: Invalid argument
mount: Could not setup loop device

I looked at the man mount file and it looked like the mount command might have needed to be -

mount `pwd`/initrd /mnt/init -t ext2 -o loop

What am I doing wrong???? I'm somewhat of a newbie to linux, and very much so with Puppy 2.01.

I'm trying all this because I can't boot off my USB stick with Puppy 2.01 on all my computers (one with nForce2 with SATA drives, laptop centrino, neither will boot but give kernel panic. Suprisingly my other nForce2 puter with only IDE drives boots fine).

What do I need to do to get Puppy 2.01 to boot from the above puters???

Thanks in advance!!
Regards!!

[Cherware]

As a complete linux-dummy I had the same trouble with the HDD on SDA and the USB stick (not) on SDB. Adding an extra 5 secs of sleep did the trick for me. Thanks to all of you.