[Cbe-oss-dev] Booting from USB

[Geoff Levand]

On 02/15/2009 12:25 PM, Keith Wright wrote:
> Goal: I'd like to have more than one Other OS available to boot on the
> PS3 for testing and demonstration purposes.
> Restriction: Only 10GiB are available to allocate.
> Proposed solution: Be able to boot from removable USB sticks 8GiB in size
> Progress: I have a great working installation of Fedora 10 currently. I
> copied all of the files from /dev/ps3da1 to /dev/sda1, and updated the
> /etc/yaboot.conf on /dev/sda1 to reflect root=/dev/sda1 and boot device
> /dev/sda. When I ran ybin (even though I was chrooted to a /dev/sda1
> root, it still gave an error of no such device /dev/sda, and it did not
> appear to update the /boot/yaboot/yaboot.conf. I have tried to boot this
> with petitboot and kboot with no success. The fatal error is:

You might try the fedora-ppc mail list, they should know about this
ybin thing you mentioned (I don't).  Actually, I don't think it is
something you should be using since I never used it.

> Unable to access resume device (UUID=blahblahblah)
> mount: error mounting /dev/root as ext3: No such file or directory

This seems to be trouble in the startup scripts, not the kernel.
The kernel seems to be OK if it got this far.

> I suspect something is wrong with the yaboot binary image or the initrd,
> but I've had no success in trying to get ybin to update the
> /boot/yaboot/* or mkinitrd. I welcome any suggestions, even an entirely
> different approach...

To avoid inadvertently using any files on the HD, you should remove it to
test.  Petitboot should read the conf file from your usb device, and should
load the kernel from there also.

There was a problem with the kernel not loading the USB drivers soon enough
at startup to use USB for the root FS, but I think that has been fixed.

You might get some clues from this, it is a similar setup only with
root=nfs:

  http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/geoff/cell/ps3-howto/ps3-nfs-root-howto.txt

-Geoff