Re: usb-storage on SMP?

[William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca>]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 08:01:23PM +0000, Paulo Marques wrote:
> William Park wrote:
> >On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 06:26:33PM +0100, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> >
> >>On Monday, 17 of January 2005 18:17, Thomas Zehetbauer wrote:
> >>
> >>>Hi,
> >>>
> >>>can anyone confirm that writing to usb-storage devices is working
> >>>on SMP systems?
> >>
> >>Generally, it is.  Recently, I've written some stuff to a USB
> >>pendrive (using 2.6.10-ac7 or -ac9).
> >
> >
> >Same here with Abit VP6 dual-P3 and 2.6.10.  It shows up as /dev/sda,
> >and I can do anything that I would do with normal harddisk.
> >
> >But, I still can't boot from it. :/  I can now mount it as root
> >filesystem, but I can't load the kernel from USB key drive.
> 
> huh?? Who's mounting the root filesystem, then :) ?
> 
> If you mean that you can't get the BIOS to load the kernel for you, and 
> you're loading the kernel from a floppy or something, you should know 
> that some BIOS are pretty selective about what they consider a valid 
> boot partition.

Hee, hee... yes, for now I boot from floppy first, then mount /dev/sda1
as root filesystem.  I, of course, want to get rid of the floppy.  My
motherboard is Mercury PVCLE266M-L with VIA C3 Samuel 2 cpu integrated
on the board.  It has tons of boot device options, and detects my USB
key (SanDisk Cruzer Mini 256MB) as "USB RMD-FDD" and not as some kind of
harddisk.  I think that's the problem: motherboard thinks it's floppy,
and LILO thinks it's SCSI harddisk (/dev/sda).

> 
> I recommend that you use fdisk to set up one partition as FAT16 type
> (even if you use another filesystem later), and make the partition
> active. You might need to write a proper MBR on the pen also (IIRC
> LILO as an option to do this).
> 
> You might also need to pass a special "disk=/dev/sda bios=0x80" (or
> something like that) option in your lilo.conf file, but that depends
> how far in the boot process you're hanging.

-- 
William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca>, Toronto, Canada
Slackware Linux -- because I can type.