hda3 won't mount, opt, home, etc are all in ramdis

Forum: HD Install
Topic: hda3 won't mount, opt, home, etc are all in ramdis
started by: fredex

Posted by fredex on Dec. 03 2005,19:43

I've been doing frugal installs on an old toshiba. The install goes OK, and the resulting system boots and "works".

But the documents telling us how to do a frugal install IMPLY that if we enter commands such as "home=hda3 etc=hda3 opt=hda3' at the prompt for extra boot options, th at subsequent boots will somehow (as if by magic??) remember those options.

So I do that and when the eventual reboot occurs it does not seem to remember that. /home and /opt are on the ramdisk, NOT on hda3. Nor is /etc, though it appears to be a simple directory in the root partition. hda3 is NOT mounted.

Are the instructions wrong (or too terse) or am I overlooking something simple?

I've found a lengthy post by tatlow < (link) > that gives a whole new install script that claims to make this stuff work but I haven't tried it yet. Anybody got any clues for me?

Posted by mikshaw on Dec. 03 2005,20:28

If home and opt are on the same partition as KNOPPIX, the boot codes will not work unless they are accompanied by the "toram" option. This may not be your problem, but you didn't specify where KNOPPIX is. Also, there is no 'etc=' boot option.

This may have changed in 2.0, although i haven't yet checked.

The "magic" is simply that the boot script looks for those boot options. If they are found, it attempts to mount that partition as home and/or opt.
Since the root partition is already mounted, the mount fails (for devs: Should it perhaps use 'mount --bind' instead?). If you use 'toram' the root partition is unmounted after copying KNOPPIX to RAM, so then it can be mounted for use with home and opt.

Posted by fredex on Dec. 03 2005,21:33

Thanks for the reply.
I'm not using 'toram'. I've got a 2 gig drive and 96MB of RAM. I'm doing a frugal install into a small partition (around 60 megs) on hda1, and was hoping to mount the things that might be changed (/home, /etc, and such-like) on hda3 (the rest of the drive), but it doesn't mount them.

The instructions don't say that I have to enter those every time it is booted, the clear implication is that doing it at install time is enough.

This is the 2.0 final release I'm installing. The instructions I"m using (for this try) are from < ASELABS >. I have previously used the instructions from the DSL site and had trouble making it boot afterwards (no operating system found) on multiple tries. I later stumbled over the frugal option in the installation procedure and have used it. The resulting system works but has the same issues I report here, using the instructions from aselabs.

Perhaps I'm simply trying to do something that can't be done, but I get the distinct impression from what I've read about DSL and on the DSL homepage that it CAN, so I'd appreciate assistance in figuring out how. Thanks!

Posted by larkl on Dec. 03 2005,22:17

If I understand your question, I think that you're going to need to modify lilo or grub and have it "remember" the boot options that you mention.