Re: Booting from usb hard disk

On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 11:41 -0400, Douglas Berry wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Mar 2009 05:36:15 CDT, Robert Noland wrote:
> > So I have my i386 install on a usb hard disk, which I can only boot
> > on one machine now.  The one machine that I can make work has a bios
> > option that reads "BIOS ehci handoff".  This used to work with the
> > old usb stack.  The machines that it doesn't work on, boot the
> > kernel, but fail to mount root, giving me the forbidding mountroot>
> > prompt, which is immediately followed by the message saying that da0
> > is attached.  da0 is however not listed in the available boot
> > devices list.  I tried playing around with the timeout in
> > vfs_mount.c, but that didn't seem to have any impact.  It has been
> > suggested that this may be a "geom" timeout, but I don't know
> > anything about the boot system really.
> 
> I have been using tunefs(8) labeled partitions on my usb hard disk
> under CURRENT. I changed the fstab entries to match the labels
> (eg. assume mylabel is myroot, /dev/da0s1a becomes /dev/ufs/myroot)
> It works well on most systems.  On some systems, I see the symptom
> you show, but I am saved by the labels showing up just after the
> mountroot prompt.  I am then able to type
> 
> 	ufs:/dev/ufs/myroot
> 
> and resume the boot.  Maybe this helps you?

Well, I haven't tried labeling the partitions, but ufs:/dev/da0s1a
doesn't work from the rootmount> prompt.  Even after da0 shows up.

robert.

> 
> cheers,
> doug
> 
-- 
Robert Noland <rnoland_at_FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD