Michael J Gruber wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I'm using an external USB disk, with the USB 2.0 controller being a > PCMCIA card. FC3 installed happily on this disk, alas it didn't boot > quite as happily from it. (Of course, I have grub on a /boot partition > of the internal IDE drive.) > > Earlier Fedora versions came with the pcinitrd script of pcmcia-cs which > facilitated the creation of initrds for booting with PCMCIA, FC3 doesn't > have it. Documentation one gets from googling mostly refers to 2.4 > kernels, where one has to hack /linuxrc to include cardmgr... > > After experimenting a while with hacking /linuxrc and /init, I found out > that mkinitrd (which comes with FC3) already does the job, as long as > one is aware of the timing problem: PCMCIA and USB need some time to > come up before devices will be recognized. > > Also, minitrd's option --with-usb always puts usb modules before modules > you specify with --with=, which is a bad thing in this case. So, just > put the usb modules after the pcmcia modules, using --with=usb-storage > etc. mkinitrd includes a "sleep 5" after loading usb-storage, and this > does the trick. > > If enough people are interested I'll write up some more details. > > Michael > I'd be seriously interested - am trying to set up similar config (USB2 over PCMCIA) on FC4. As a step 1, I tried to set machine up using built-in USB1.1 - for unknown reason it doesn't work either. I'll elaborate a bit: Install went flawlessly, FC4 sitting on external disk (/dev/sde1 as / plus /dev/sde2 as swap, GRUB in MBR of external disk /dev/sde). Booted into 'linux rescue', mounted root partition and chrooted to it. Running mkinitrd with following preloads: ehci-hcd, usb-storage, scsi_mod, sd_mod. As it turns out later, FC4 puts "sleep 8" after usb-storage is 'insmodded'. Rebooting again, entering command-line mode of GRUB: kernel vmlinuz-... ro root=/dev/sde1 should it be sde1 or only sde? initrd initrd-usb.gz customized initrd with above mentioned preloads boot For a while, everything looks fine - kernel uncompressed, USB storage module registered; critical part: mkrootdev looks fine, but mount of root FAILS with rc=6 (I believe I had rc=2 whilst using separate /boot partition (have tried many variants of install)), kernel (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4) spits out approx. 2 screens of garbage and machine seems to hang. No idea why... Questions in my mind: (i) what on the earth makes this not to boot properly? Any missing preload? (ii) Once I make this work (if ever): what needs to be preloaded for PCMCIA part? Or - maybe even better: would it be possible to show relevant part of initrd script? I'd be grateful for any hints, spent couple of days with no avail so far. Thanks in advance, Milos
