Build a Gentoo install/boot/rescue LiveCD USB

DanBUK · Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2003 9:31 pm Post subject:

I think this is mentioned a bit further up this topic but I think all USB sticks need a VFAT filesystem.

Filo_kg · n00b Joined: 25 May 2003 Posts: 15 Location: Poznan/Poland

DanBUK · Last edited by DanBUK on Sun Nov 09, 2003 7:08 pm; edited 1 time in total

AgenT · Apprentice Joined: 18 May 2003 Posts: 280

DanBUK · Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2003 3:10 pm Post subject: cloop segmentation fault

Hi All,
I have been playing with livecd-ngand I kept on getting a cloop segmentation fault on the livecd-ng cloop stage. Having done some reading on the cloop bugs db, I think this error is todo with cloop needing memory for the whole clooped image, so as I am upto about 1.2GB on the cd I therefore need 1.2GB of RAM or SWAP available. I am waiting for the current livecd-ng cloop to finish, butI think this has solved my problem. Will let you know in about 30mins when this finishes....

Anyone else been having problems with cloop?

Cheers,
Dan.

DanBUK · Last edited by DanBUK on Sun Nov 09, 2003 7:12 pm; edited 1 time in total

I did in the end solve this seg fault problem, I think. I have reverted back to the 0.63.1-4 version of cloop, as its the marked stable version. (still increased my swap to 1.3GB + 256Mb Ram for the cloop stage)
And I am currently typing this inside my new livecd. Approx 330Mb ISO image (which is 28% of original size!) . Not much been installed on...

Alsa - All drivers
X (inc nvidia drivers)
Fluxbox
Mplayer
Gimp
Mozilla
Gabber
xChat
Nessus
OpenSSH
mlDonkey(If you wanted to dl to ALL of your HDD space by booting from CD...)

And its running quite well...
Now I think the process of making them is a bit more stable, time for diff versions...
Cheers,
Dan.

DiS-K · Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2003 8:08 am Post subject:

This stuff works great.
I got it working with a Dell USB drive on a Dell Optiplex GX260.

Hint: Turn on USB Emulation in the Bios if it isn't already. That'll make USB available at boot, and made my Optiplex machine able to boot of the drive.

I also tried to boot of it on a Dell Latitude C640 (portable pc), but unfortunately, it doesn't support booting of USB.

grudge · Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2003 1:12 pm Post subject:

Cool, I recently got a 128 mb stick which I use for transferring files between work and home. I'm def going to try this. Just a couple of quick questions :

1) I understand that if your motherboard doesn't support booting from a usb device, then you can still create a small bootdisk which then boots the usb stick. Is this true ? and if so, how would I go to try and create something like this...

2) How easy would it be to load something like X on the stick, obviously the different screencards would be a problem (for use in dif pc's). Any way around this, like a hardware detection proggie ?

3) Same idea as 2, but for different network cards, sound cards, etc ? Would be difficult to create some or other program which runs when you startup to either detect your hardware or which will ask you for the different hardware you have.

I'm just curious .... :wink:

DanBUK · Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2003 4:18 pm Post subject: Autoconfig - Hardware

If your looking for hardware detection, take a look at the Knoppix cdrom, there are autoconfig scripts you can rip/modifiy quite easily.
I have put links to them in this topic:-
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=62734

Hope this is of some help.

Cheers, Dan.

jspectre · n00b Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 18 Location: Midwest, USA

I've been trying to make this work. I was wondering if anyone knew for sure if a LinkSys 2.0 (HighSpeed USB) 256M stick would work? I've got a Soyo K7VTA-B (2BA1) mobo.

I've also got a question on formatting the stick. I formatted it with fdisk, made one giant partition. Tried FAT16. Turned on the boot flag. Should it have been something else? Tried every USB boot option on my mobo (ZIP, FD, CD and HDD) but nothing seemed to work.

Thanks!
_________________
15% of the populace will never steal.
15% of the populace will steal most anything not nailed down.

gladbach · n00b Joined: 15 Jun 2002 Posts: 50

needs vfat from up in the thread.

gladbach · n00b Joined: 15 Jun 2002 Posts: 50

mine is dying in the build process. I dont see that I am missing anything in the tutorial.... ;/

semireg · n00b Joined: 14 Jul 2003 Posts: 1

I'm was born on a redhat system, so please forgive my gentoo naiveness.

I have completed all the steps listed in the thread and it boots fine. However, after I pick my keymap it says "CD not found". I have a USB 2.0 external cd-rom that I would like to be able to mount discs from. This enclosure works fine under my redhat system, is there something I'm missing? lsmod shows usb-storage, usb-uhci and usbcore loaded.

If there is another thread/resource that would be better suited to aide me, thanks for showing me the way

Loving gentoo, Semireg

The Sentinel · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 10 Sep 2002 Posts: 76

jago25_98 · Apprentice Joined: 23 Aug 2002 Posts: 180

Not all can boot of usb.

If we could make a boot floppy with

- usb_massstorage
- sd_mod
(2.5+ kernel modules)

and then append="root=/dev/sda1" probably via grub because it can be edited live, then all can boot from usb.

But does it fit?

smouge · Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2003 8:55 am Post subject:

gmichels · Guru Joined: 20 Jun 2003 Posts: 480 Location: Brazil

I am trying to create a livecd with a kernel with support for the SiI3112 Sata raid controller.

I am using:

- 1.4rc4 stage 3 package
- latest ac-sources

I had to make some minor adjustments in /usr/sbin/livecd-ng such as changing the busybox executable to busybox.sh and change the initrd filesystem inodes to 5000. Apart from that, everything ran fine.

When I try to boot my created livecd, here's what I get:

[img:86c70cf395]http://www.colortechdp.com.br/pessoal/init.jpg[/img:86c70cf395]

I am sure there's support for ramdisk and initrd in the kernel.

cchee · Apprentice Joined: 29 Jul 2003 Posts: 214 Location: NYC

First of all, thanks for great tip here.... i have been looking for this since i get my hand on gentoo (recently)... Now that I follow the instruction, I ran into a problem of conflict package as show below when i ran livecd-ng gentoo-basic build:

[blocks B ] <dev-perl/ExtUtils-MakeMaker-6.05-r6 (from pkg dev-lang/perl-5.8.0-r12)
[ebuild U ] dev-lang/perl-5.8.0-r12 [5.8.0-r10]

I am using stage3-x86-1.4_rc4.tar.bz2 in my CD_STAGETARBALL setttings. Any idea on how to resolve this? Thanks in advance.

gmichels · Guru Joined: 20 Jun 2003 Posts: 480 Location: Brazil

That happens while trying to emerge irssi, a text based irc client. You could just open /etc/livecd-ng/profiles/gentoo-basic/stage1-packages and comment the irssi line, if you don't need one.

The true cause is because your current portage tree has a newer perl version which has some internal modules (extutils is one of them) and the version in the stage3 tarball is older and still use external modules, which is blocking the update.

Oh btw I managed to solve my initrd problem and it's almost working on my custom hardware.

second_exodous · Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2003 2:17 am Post subject:

Has anyone with a mini-itx board set up a usb flash drive to run linux, leaving the HD in the case(the one I want only can have one HD) for video/music? I want to build a vdr and want linux to take up as little space as possible, i.e. rest on a little usb flash drive.

Is this possible? I scanned through this thread and all people are trying to do here is make a live cd. What I'm wondering is can the entire linux system be just on the usb flash drive?

For a vdr box I don't need any gui(vdr has it's own) and just have networking so I can pull video off of it onto my other computers. VDR (http://www.cadsoft.de/people/kls/vdr/) even has plugins for playing dvds. I also wouldn't need drivers beyond the one my coputer needs, since it will only be used on one computer.

I know this is possible with linux, but I'm getting used to emerge and want to use gentoo to do this. Wasn't there a fork in gentoo just for stuff like this?

Thanx,
Stan

Ssl · Apprentice Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 178 Location: Serbia

Hello all gentoo linux friends!

First I really appreciate work on this HOWTO and found almost all replies usefull while trying to make my own test-demo-fun-good-way-to-learn-gentoo-internals livecd.

But I am having problems and hope many of you solved this and are kind enough to help.

Last step I did was ...livecd-ng gentoo-basic isogen and unmount. Burned cd and basically I got this error:

Checking root filesystem...
fsck 1.33 ...

ext2fs_check_of_mount: No such file or directory while determining weather / is mounted

* Filesystem couldn't be fixed [!!]

Give root password for maintaince and so on.

I think it is related with /etc/fstab /etc/mtab but not sure. Any solution?
PS. If this is not detailed enough please ask for more info.

Thank You,
Slobodan Sredojevic

murphynet · n00b Joined: 27 May 2003 Posts: 10

Hey all.

My cd boots up fine until just after "switching to tmpfs" when it trys to remount the root filesystem with read/write.

"Root filesystem could not be mounted R/W

"

could this be a problem with my kernel?
_________________
tommay

xanthumn · n00b Joined: 13 Mar 2003 Posts: 9

Thanks for the wonderful howto!

However I have the same problem as murphynet ... CD boots just fine, but stops after switching to tmpfs.

USING: stage3-x86-1.4-20030806.tar.bz2

BurnedOutGeek · n00b Joined: 17 Aug 2003 Posts: 27

I have been following the directions and have the following error when I run livecd-ng gentoo-basic initrd:

Using current working directory as LIVECD_ROOT.
80000+0 records in
80000+0 records out
mount: could not find any device /dev/loop#
chroot_generate: aborting.

Any ideas why? I'm getting close!

Mark

woffer · Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2003 12:05 pm Post subject:

Hi,
I'm getting an error while runing liveng-cd gentoo-fegis initrd