Hi - answered my own question above :: exit jail
First, great pages Dave - learning curve's been steep the last week or more! Today I finally managed to get a working install on a USB2 device that has stumped me all week with about 5 or more attempts. I have seen nearly all of the errors that others have found at one point or another. The success today was combining info from both of the node 25 and 94 pages and carefully going through line by line in each section of each How To and omitting the encryption related stuff as Iḿ using only one partition, and don't want it anyway;
I found one definite problem that may have caught others if, like me, they raced through cutting and pasting commands just get things working. I was only careful checking the command line pastes for the right drive info - sdb in my case - but missed the etc/fstab file line each go except today, so the device was never going to boot all the way in to find its root fs , all other things being equal and is obviously the reason got the:
pivot_root : No such file or directory // Kernel panic ! and
can't open tty console - type of errors
for those of you who also have a SATA main drive in your PC which of course is sda! Idiot...
The first problems with this one device though, seemed to be "parted" not writing to the MBR correctly as when I checked the info Seth gave I also had parttion unreadable/anomolies in fdisk and cfdisk which may have been because the device had a messed mbr from all those Windows formats done when it was a working MP3 unit initially. I rewrote the MBR with
#apt-get install mbr
#install-mbr /dev/sdb
and did the partitioning and formatting with cfdisk and mkfs.ext2 first which seemed to fix things.
So its worth checking your device first before just plugging in and pasting commands then finding grub can't install properly later with a "can't read stage1 or 2" type error later on etc..
.
One other mistake I made was leaving and forgetting another USB disk device plugged in (a 2GB stick that had a first time succesfull encrypted install, node 94) when booting, which the main device tried to load and read stopping at something like
device sdd .0.0.0.0 assuming write cache-through
and got stuck which when removed and rebooted worked.
This time the install seemed to get stuck at (mkinitramfs) prompt and when I thought it had failed again,the device continued as it switched on again after 15-20 secs, then went all the way no probs.
Anyway, there was much more fun hosing both systems with the careless use of #rm -vR /tmp/.* in a clean up attempt (don't ask...!!) which recursively wiped both my main system and the USB within seconds!!...but I put that in just to give a smile or 2 to those experts out there! And messing up my main pc boot sector with grub and not having a boot floppy..ho hum..recovered it using the successful encrypted 2GB disk though , haha..!
For the next stage, now I have my wifi netcard and Samba working on it, seeing as Puppy Linux (which has never worked properly an any machine Ive had in the last 2 years) and Damn Small Linux claim to have a desktop environments for surfing, Office etc that fits on 50-90MB etc.(DSL-N didn't work today either!!) is there a Debian friendly X setup (much smaller than Gnome) anyone knows, that I could add to this sytem with my remaining 90M of space on this 479M drive? (incidently, how come the partition size was 518.2MB in cfdisk to start and now shows 479M total size, using
#df -h /dev/sdb
from my main system?? thatś 40M disappeared?!
I really would like this 512Mb disk to have desktop functions as its fast, cause the 2GB drive is USB1.1 only but works well enough with Gnome once its booted (slowly!)
thanks for a very interesting and useful website - I learned loads..
info
Hi - answered my own question above :: exit jail
First, great pages Dave - learning curve's been steep the last week or more! Today I finally managed to get a working install on a USB2 device that has stumped me all week with about 5 or more attempts. I have seen nearly all of the errors that others have found at one point or another. The success today was combining info from both of the node 25 and 94 pages and carefully going through line by line in each section of each How To and omitting the encryption related stuff as Iḿ using only one partition, and don't want it anyway;
I found one definite problem that may have caught others if, like me, they raced through cutting and pasting commands just get things working. I was only careful checking the command line pastes for the right drive info - sdb in my case - but missed the etc/fstab file line each go except today, so the device was never going to boot all the way in to find its root fs , all other things being equal and is obviously the reason got the:
pivot_root : No such file or directory // Kernel panic ! and
can't open tty console - type of errors
for those of you who also have a SATA main drive in your PC which of course is sda! Idiot...
The first problems with this one device though, seemed to be "parted" not writing to the MBR correctly as when I checked the info Seth gave I also had parttion unreadable/anomolies in fdisk and cfdisk which may have been because the device had a messed mbr from all those Windows formats done when it was a working MP3 unit initially. I rewrote the MBR with
#apt-get install mbr
#install-mbr /dev/sdb
and did the partitioning and formatting with cfdisk and mkfs.ext2 first which seemed to fix things.
So its worth checking your device first before just plugging in and pasting commands then finding grub can't install properly later with a "can't read stage1 or 2" type error later on etc..
.
One other mistake I made was leaving and forgetting another USB disk device plugged in (a 2GB stick that had a first time succesfull encrypted install, node 94) when booting, which the main device tried to load and read stopping at something like
device sdd .0.0.0.0 assuming write cache-through
and got stuck which when removed and rebooted worked.
This time the install seemed to get stuck at (mkinitramfs) prompt and when I thought it had failed again,the device continued as it switched on again after 15-20 secs, then went all the way no probs.
Anyway, there was much more fun hosing both systems with the careless use of #rm -vR /tmp/.* in a clean up attempt (don't ask...!!) which recursively wiped both my main system and the USB within seconds!!...but I put that in just to give a smile or 2 to those experts out there! And messing up my main pc boot sector with grub and not having a boot floppy..ho hum..recovered it using the successful encrypted 2GB disk though , haha..!
For the next stage, now I have my wifi netcard and Samba working on it, seeing as Puppy Linux (which has never worked properly an any machine Ive had in the last 2 years) and Damn Small Linux claim to have a desktop environments for surfing, Office etc that fits on 50-90MB etc.(DSL-N didn't work today either!!) is there a Debian friendly X setup (much smaller than Gnome) anyone knows, that I could add to this sytem with my remaining 90M of space on this 479M drive? (incidently, how come the partition size was 518.2MB in cfdisk to start and now shows 479M total size, using
#df -h /dev/sdb
from my main system?? thatś 40M disappeared?!
I really would like this 512Mb disk to have desktop functions as its fast, cause the 2GB drive is USB1.1 only but works well enough with Gnome once its booted (slowly!)
thanks for a very interesting and useful website - I learned loads..