bootdisk floppy

[aaronamd]

well I have just installed gentoo on an external firewire drive that detects as /dev/sda. I have partitioned it as follows

[MEW]

There is a guide for that (it was even written for Gentoo!) located at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library-combined/l-fireboot.html

[aaronamd]

thank you, I will be looking into that :p EDIT: -- now I have tried that link and decided to use my usb stick as the boot device (which I KNOW I can boot from) and mount that as /boot on the firewire drive, install grub to it and ...nothing, the system comes up saying that "this device does not have valid data to boot or is corrupt" I choose the usb stick because I can't get my kernel small enough to fit on a floppy, I can only get it down to 1.7megs and I have run out of ideals, the whole initrd thing scares me alot, I have never done that before, I REALLY want to use the usb stick to boot from and then the firewire drive as my main drive, I am unfortunatly running out of time to do this in as school is approching tommorow and I need to get a working system up in 3 days max ...
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[MEW]

Please post the commands you entered to install grub.

Something else you might want to try would be to have the kernel on the firewire disk and grub on a floppy. I don't know how good grub's support is for firewire drives, but you could put a file (any file) on the firewire disk, install grub on a floppy, boot (from the floppy) to the grub shell, and then use grub's "find" command to see if grub can see the file. (e.g. try "find /etc/make.conf" and check if grub lists any partitions with the file /etc/make.conf on them).

[aaronamd]

well now I have changed the partition table as follows

[aaronamd]

bump....
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[aaronamd]

well I just made some major progress, I found an old 3.1 gig western digital hard disk in the closet that works nad is now my /boot partition, everything boots correctly except that when the kernel trys to mount the root fs which is on the firewire disk it detects it too late and won't sync. now I have a fairly good ideal here that I will have to use some sort of initrd. I will keep you posted.


--now that i've tried to find out how to make an initrd, would anyone want to show me how?
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[MEW]

Take a look at sys-apps/mkinitrd. (I haven't tried it, because I use a one-step boot, but I think it's what you want.)

EDIT: This might also be helpful: http://www.lissot.net/partition/ramdisk.html

[aaronamd]

ok thanks for all your help, but even with the initrd it just hangs at the same retarded point but within the initrd... is there something I'm doing wrong? I would really like to get this thing booting, if anyone else has any ideals before I go out to buy an internal hard disk and waste more money please! speakup! I don't know what else to do.
I followed what was in the link that you gave me about the initrd but the kernel STILL trys to mount root BEFORE my firewire drive is detected. and not even half a secound later it is recognized
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[MEW]

You could try this:

[quote=MEW]Something else you might want to try would be to have the kernel on the firewire disk and grub on a floppy. I don't know how good grub's support is for firewire drives, but you could put a file (any file) on the firewire disk, install grub on a floppy, boot (from the floppy) to the grub shell, and then use grub's "find" command to see if grub can see the file. (e.g. try "find /etc/make.conf" and check if grub lists any partitions with the file /etc/make.conf on them).[/quote]

[aaronamd]

I did, I forgot to mention it though because grub had geometry errors on the floppy, it would either say "grub geom error" or repeat the word "grub" over and over again until filling up the screen
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