[IDEA] Boot XBian from USB

[Smultie]

All went well.
Is there a way to check wether the XBMC runs from USB or SD?

[Fred]

Use command 'df' to see which device is mounted in /

[Smultie]

(31st Jul, 2013 01:55 AM)Fred Wrote:  Use command 'df' to see which device is mounted in /

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs 7831548 1642208 5505528 23% /
udev 10240 4 10236 1% /dev
tmpfs 192692 136 192556 1% /run
/dev/sda1 7831548 1642208 5505528 23% /
none 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock
none 192692 0 192692 0% /run/shm
none 102400 0 102400 0% /run/user
/dev/mmcblk0p1 34662 13585 21077 40% /boot

All is well I guess?

---

Hhhm, no image since USB installation.
SSH works, how can I fix that?

---

Great,
sudo rm /boot/cmdline.txt
sudo mv cmdline.txt.backup cmdline.txt

doesn't work either. Now I have nothing....

[Fred]

From your output you can see that /dev/sda1, which is your usb drive, is mounted on / . So that's good.
Don't know why you have no image.

It should be 'sudo mv /boot/cmdline.txt.backup /boot/cmdline.txt'

Now you probably only removed the cmdline.txt so the RPi won´t boot at all. You can fix that by putting the SD card in a your computer and rename the file cmdline.txt.backup (in the boot folder) to cmdline.txt

[Smultie]

Well, fresh install later (thank whoeveryouwant for XBMCBackup ) I'm now running my previous installation from USB. Can't really say if it's quicker tbh.

[rikardo1979]

(31st Jul, 2013 03:19 AM)Smultie Wrote:  Well, fresh install later (thank whoeveryouwant for XBMCBackup ) I'm now running my previous installation from USB. Can't really say if it's quicker tbh.

moving to USB do not have a real sense if we talk about speed up, this is a good solution for those who having SD card problems when overclocking.

[Smultie]

(31st Jul, 2013 03:25 AM)rikardo1979 Wrote:  

(31st Jul, 2013 03:19 AM)Smultie Wrote:  Well, fresh install later (thank whoeveryouwant for XBMCBackup ) I'm now running my previous installation from USB. Can't really say if it's quicker tbh.

moving to USB do not have a real sense if we talk about speed up, this is a good solution for those who having SD card problems when overclocking.

Pity, that's what most people have been telling me.

[f1vefour]

(31st Jul, 2013 03:25 AM)rikardo1979 Wrote:  

(31st Jul, 2013 03:19 AM)Smultie Wrote:  Well, fresh install later (thank whoeveryouwant for XBMCBackup ) I'm now running my previous installation from USB. Can't really say if it's quicker tbh.

moving to USB do not have a real sense if we talk about speed up, this is a good solution for those who having SD card problems when overclocking.

It makes the most sense to run /home from USB since it is cheaper/easier to find large gigabyte flash drives. This is going to be the area needing maximum storage, I think 8GB Class 4 SD with 16+ gigabyte of storage for /home on USB is ideal IMHO.

[Fred]

You could gain some performance by moving your installation to USB, but you could also loose some. This is different for every situation depending on the SD card and USB drive you are using.

[mk01]

just general reply to the benchmark/speed sd/usb. the speed of media is not the main factor there, RPI is too slow to take benefit from it (comparing class 10 sd with usb hdd for instance). but some benefit is seen when combined sd / usb. when I was briefly looking for some alternatives, I moved the home sub volume to usb stick and /usr/local to a sub volume on usb stick (the same one).

with the setup at that time, start of xbmc went down from 50s to 40s. but just to show how all relative is, my idea (in opposite to f1vefour) was always to have on sd card the needed minimum (boot initramfs from sdcard's boot area, connect lan and load rootfs from network). the network storage is capable for few bucks 250-300MB/s, 90MB/s over the network. so for example the 70mb of xbmc binaries and libs is instantly in cache of the server and pure xbmc start in 14s compared to 20s from local storage (with much less io load). on the other hand, latency is a problem on network though.

what we need is second core. not one faster, but second.

it is pure IMHO, but… RPI is amazing in HW decoding of video. so let's use it as media renderer. nothing else. my xbmcvideo and music db is at 750mb on mysql, I can't imagine RPI doing one update on it in case it would be locally.

---

but what I wanted to say and forgot is that it simply doesn't make sense (wasting time going for speed) - at least not through moving installations to different media.

but, other aspects could be motivating: fail safe factor, time to restore from scratch etc.

[f1vefour]

Perfectly said mk01. This has +1 written all over it.

[rbthompsonv]

Hey guys... trying to get my Xbian to boot from USB.. and trying to go the easy route and use the installer... but I get :
XBian will be set up to use /dev/sda1 as the root partition.


Creating btr filesystem on /dev/sda1...
umount: /home: device is busy.
(In some cases useful info about processes that use
the device is found by lsof(8) or fuser(1))
umount: /: device is busy.
(In some cases useful info about processes that use
the device is found by lsof(8) or fuser(1))
The filesystem could not be created. Aborting...

[Uncle_Tubbie]

There are others smarter then me around here, but did you try

Running " lsusb ' to ensure you external drive it populates?
and " df -h " to define what the paritions your external drive is named.

If it's a USB drive, it should report back as /dev/sda1.

The above proudly stolen from one of XBMCNut posts.

[mk01]

just posted what I promised - btrfs-auto-snapshot tool with xbiancopy option to create copy of xbian installation to another media.

following packages are needed:
xbian-package-config-shell version 2.1.4
btrfs-tools version 1.0-xbian

both are available here:
http://ivka57.dyndns-ip.com

they will be updated automatically with apt-get upgrade if you are on beta2, if not, download the files with wget and install with

Code:

dpkg -i xbian-package-config-shell_2.1.4_armhf.deb btrfs-tools_1.0-xbian_armhf.deb

to copy xbian to another media, just run:

Code:

btrfs-auto-snapshot xbiancopy /dev/mmcblk0p2 /dev/XXXXX

partition (/dev/XXXXX) needs to exists on destination media and must not be mounted !
the command will itself create btrfs filesystem (with label xbian-copy) and copy what is needed.

follow-up steps will be displayed after copy directly on the screen.
(for beta2, no changes are needed though - only modification of cmdline.txt, for beta1 and 1.1 small modification of /etc/fstab is needed on the new copy - but again, details are shown after the copy process finishes).

mk

[InspMustache]

Awesome work! Will try this as soon as I get home.