Damn Small Linux - Not!

madopal · Joined: 04 Jan 2007 Posts: 5 Location: Evanston, IL

Hey all,

Anyone out there successfully get booting with grub going? I have it booting to grub, and the initrd seems to be happening, but after that point, it says that it "can't find KNOPPIX filesystem." I don't know what I'm missing to get the boot to find the KNOPPIX stuff.

I found a writeup and followed the instructions. It seemed to work, but not quite.

[url]http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/grub_intro[/url]

Anyone know what I might be doing wrong? I have the KNOPPIX directory at the root of the USB drive, and I was looking into options in the kernel line, but I've had no luck.

Any ideas?

madopal · Joined: 04 Jan 2007 Posts: 5 Location: Evanston, IL

Just a few stupid things. First, the article I posted a link to uses menu.lst as the config file, and they've seemingly moved grub over to grub.conf.

Second, the path for the knoppix_install has to be absolute, not relative. I tried that, but I tried it in menu.lst instead of grub.conf (I had copied instead of soft linking because the system wouldn't let me soft link on a USB drive for some reason), so I missed it.

Anyway, that site I linked to is the way to use grub if anyone wants. Worked fine, except that DSL-N then thought the USB drive was the CDROM, and it mounted it under /cdrom as read only. I'm trying to use the installer after booting from the CD to see if I can get around that.

Juanito · Joined: 11 Sep 2006 Posts: 88 Location: Dubai, U.A.E.

I'm using DSL-N from a USB boot and have the same problem in that the USB stick is mounted read-only as /cdrom.

I kind of got round this by making a second partition on the USB stick to allow me to save files, etc but this is not ideal as Windows cannot read a second partition on a USB stick.

Curiously, I don't have the same problem with DSL...

madopal · Joined: 04 Jan 2007 Posts: 5 Location: Evanston, IL

I got around the readonly/CDROM issue by using the "Install to Hard Drive" tool that comes with DSL-N. It took some manual work getting grub to boot properly after installing (due to the issue below), but it seems to be booting, getting to grub, and starting the kernel, sorta.

I've got the full FS expanded now, but the problem seems to be that the kernel wasn't compiled with SCSI support, so it can't mount the drive.

My choices seem to be a) recompile the kernel, or b) stick an initrd in there. Has anyone either a) found the config file that was used to build this kernel, or b) made an initrd file?

Juanito · Joined: 11 Sep 2006 Posts: 88 Location: Dubai, U.A.E.

I didn't try DSL-N with scsi hd but I have tried DSL with scsi and it works fine - I would think that DSL-N has the same scsi support as DSL.

Maybe the problem is that DSL-N does not have the correct module for your scsi adapter?

madopal · Joined: 04 Jan 2007 Posts: 5 Location: Evanston, IL

Well, the installed DSL-N clearly works with SCSI devices, but looking at the config info and modules on a HD install, everything SCSI is a module. That presents a problem during boot, as the kernel, not yet having been fully loaded, can't load the drive, because it doesn't know how to.

It's a bootstrap problem, and it's the reason initrd exists in the first place...if the modules to load the drive hardware aren't compiled into the kernel, then they HAVE to be loaded before the kernel tries to mount the drive. Chicken/egg thing, you see.

So, what I really need is a new version of minirt that has USB/SCSI support in there, and a version that does NOT look for the KNOPPIX install as a compressed blob. I grabbed the existing minirt.gz off of the CD ISO. It gets further, but it says it can't find a knoppix FS. I've played around with cheat codes a bit to see if I could coax it into finding it, but no dice. I think I have to look into how Knoppix works and how the kernel starts the Knoppix stuff.

Juanito · Joined: 11 Sep 2006 Posts: 88 Location: Dubai, U.A.E.

I didn't try it with DSL-N but with DSL I managed to recompile some modules into the kernel - at the boot prompt I could then type bzImage or vmlinuz and DSL loaded the recompiled kernel.

I would guess that you would be able to do this with the relevant scsi driver