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Gentoo on external firewire drive?
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ketanrp
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Joined: 19 Apr 2002
Posts: 14

PostPosted: Sat Jun 22, 2002 6:51 am    Post subject: Gentoo on external firewire drive? Reply with quote

Has anybody installed Gentoo onto an external firewire hard drive? I just purchased a Powerbook and was wondering if I should get an external drive so I could have a seperate linux drive.

Thanks.
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trance
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Joined: 06 May 2002
Posts: 13
Location: Santa Clara, CA

PostPosted: Wed Aug 07, 2002 11:51 pm    Post subject: Gentoo booting on ext FW drive Reply with quote

While the kernel has support for using a firewire device, it can't yet boot from it.

Hopefully in the future that will get fixed, but for the time being since FW booting is pretty much a hack, even in Mac OS, it will be awhile.

trance
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danno
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Joined: 18 Jun 2002
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Location: Saskatoon, SK, Canada

PostPosted: Thu Aug 08, 2002 8:50 pm    Post subject: Boot: No, but run root: yes. Reply with quote

trance wrote:
While the kernel has support for using a firewire device, it can't yet boot from it.


Maybe not, but you can run your root filesystem off it. I have Gentoo running from my Firewire disk (A LaCie 40GB) on my 600MHZ iBook. Here is a brief procedure to get it running (Yes, this is a serious hack):

Build a kernel with the linux1394 drivers built as modules (Or just use a BenH kernel from www.ppckernel.org). Create an initrd image, and put on it at the very least, sh, modutils, a linuxrc file, and the ohci1394, ieee1394, and sbp2 modules. Have the linuxrc file load all the above modules, but have it sleep for 5 seconds between loading ohci1394 and sbp2. Install your kernel and modules as usual. GZip your new boot image, and put it, the kernel, and yaboot and yaboot.conf in the root directory of your MacOS partition.

If you set it up correctly your computer will start the linux kernel from your internal drive, load the initrd image into ram, load the 1394 modules, and set root to your firewire drive, then continue booting. I've been doing this for a while, it works, but it's a PITA because you need to boot it through OpenFirmware, unless you want to create a boot script for choosing MacOS or Linux.

If you want examples, feel free to ICQ or e-mail me.
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