Baslinux mailing list

["David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

David Moberg wrote:
>
> I copied it to my memory card, gunzipped and chrooted into it.
> It seems to work fine. I still think that something is wrong with
> your card, your drivers, or the way you copied the file over.

I have successfully booted Sindi's miniBL3 (usbcam.gz) from
a USB 'key' drive. I used the usbcam.gz for the root filesystem,
the bzImage.431 for a kernel, and syslinux as the bootloader.
This process worked with a 128MB Sandisk Cruzer Mini drive.
It should also be easy to modify the blppaz initrd and use that
with this boot method to boot BL3 loop from a USB storage
device.

I chose syslinux as the bootloader because it appears to be the
most supported for booting from a USB drive. First I installed
syslinux (from source) and read the documentation. According
to README.usbkey, you need to execute two commands, which
wipe the disk and prepare it to boot.

mkdiskimage -4 /dev/sda 0 64 32
syslinux /dev/sda4

mkdiskimage took several minutes, likely because I used a
USB 1.1 (12Mbit/s) PC.After these steps, I mounted sda4 and
copied usbcam.gz and bzImage.431 (renamed to linux) to the
disk. Finally, I created a syslinux.cfg:

DEFAULT linux initrd=usbcam.gz ramdisk_size=16384 root=/dev/ram0 rw

This automatically boots kernel 'linux' with initrd 'usbcam.gz'. I
allowed 16384k (16MB) for the initrd because the usbcam.gz
appears to be slightly larger than 8mb, uncompressed.

I unmounted the disk and moved it to a USB2 PC that can boot
from USB storage. I turned it on and selected 'USB Storage
Device' as the boot medium. About 15 seconds later, I saw a
prompt which said something about pressing Ctrl+C to start
miniBL3. I did press Ctrl+C and then the BL3 was running. I
looked at two manpages and tried zgv on a photo; everything
seems to work perfectly.

It should not be too difficult to modify the blppaz initrd to
boot BL3 loop. It just needs to insert the usb-storage modules
and look in sda4 or sdb4 for the loop image.

David