[IDEA] Boot XBian from USB

[thedude459]

So I got a usb drive and formatted it as ext4 on my laptop. Plugged it in and did a df -h and it said the drive was a /dev/sda. I sshed in and did the xbian copier. Put sda as the drive. After it finished I rebooted and checked to make sure it was still /dev/sda and it was. I changed the /boot/cmdline.txt to be root=/dev/sda and did a reboot.

It freezes at init process.

[IriDium]

(7th Nov, 2013 03:01 AM)thedude459 Wrote:  So I got a usb drive and formatted it as ext4 on my laptop. Plugged it in and did a df -h and it said the drive was a /dev/sda. I sshed in and did the xbian copier. Put sda as the drive. After it finished I rebooted and checked to make sure it was still /dev/sda and it was. I changed the /boot/cmdline.txt to be root=/dev/sda and did a reboot.

It freezes at init process.

Strange is was just sda not sda1.

What process are you using? What release are you on?

Can you format it as fat32 and try that.

That's the process I use and I've never had a problem.

[thedude459]

I am on the latest beta2 image that mk01 posted. I did an apt-get update then apt-get upgrade then used the xbian-config and xbian copier.

I thought it was strange that it came up as sda instead of sda1 as well. I wasn't sure if that is caused by having a wireless adapter in one of the usb ports.

I will try with formatting as fat32 and try again.

[thedude459]

Here is what I did:
xbian@xbian ~ $ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 30G 694M 29G 3% /
udev 256K 4.0K 252K 2% /dev
tmpfs 13M 208K 12M 2% /run
/dev/mmcblk0p2 30G 694M 29G 3% /
/dev/mmcblk0p1 34M 19M 16M 56% /boot
/dev/mmcblk0p2 30G 694M 29G 3% /home
/dev/mmcblk0p2 30G 694M 29G 3% /lib/modules
/dev/mmcblk0p2 30G 694M 29G 3% /xbmc-backup
/dev/sda 7.8G 4.0K 7.8G 1% /media/New Volume

Then I went to xbian-config option 6 and put in sda where it had sdxx. Let it run the process.

When I do a df -h after the process it doesn't show up. I assume this is ok.

I then do sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt and change to root=/dev/sda

Then sudo reboot.

When it reboots it freezes in the init process with the bar going a little more then half way.

[belese]

if sda and not sda1, mean that no partiton table is found on your key.
have your key has U3 support? if yes maybe try to recreate table partiton (with gparted, it's possible).

[IriDium]

Something is wrong..... Can you format your external drive and don't put any spaces in it, so Just NewVolume or whatever. ... and try again.

df -h should show the volume after the copy.

It should look like this:
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 16384 Jan 1 1970 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 158 Nov 2 13:44 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 17816 Aug 24 12:23 bootcode.bin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 319 Nov 2 14:02 cmdline.default
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 314 Nov 2 14:02 cmdline.txt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 314 Nov 2 13:46 cmdline.txt.old
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 180 Nov 5 19:49 config.txt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 18693 Nov 11 2012 COPYING.linux
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8782 Oct 1 13:40 fixup.dat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5573180 Nov 2 14:24 initramfs.gz
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5501269 Nov 2 14:09 initramfs.gz.old
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2845608 Sep 30 02:57 kernel.img
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1447 Nov 11 2012 LICENCE.broadcom
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 582 Nov 11 2012 README.md
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3477348 Oct 1 13:40 start.elf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1104721 Oct 13 09:04 System.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1104721 Sep 30 02:57 System.map-3.10.12+

If it does, then it should boot off of the external drive and the "space" is the issue.

[thedude459]

(8th Nov, 2013 01:04 AM)belese Wrote:  if sda and not sda1, mean that no partiton table is found on your key.
have your key has U3 support? if yes maybe try to recreate table partiton (with gparted, it's possible).

Belese was right was I reformatted the usb with the GUID Partition table then formated the disk to fat32

After that it is now showing as sda1 and I went through the same process to copy to the USB.

Now it is stuck on FS Resize.

[IriDium]

(8th Nov, 2013 07:56 AM)thedude459 Wrote:  

(8th Nov, 2013 01:04 AM)belese Wrote:  if sda and not sda1, mean that no partiton table is found on your key.
have your key has U3 support? if yes maybe try to recreate table partiton (with gparted, it's possible).

Belese was right was I reformatted the usb with the GUID Partition table then formated the disk to fat32

After that it is now showing as sda1 and I went through the same process to copy to the USB.

Now it is stuck on FS Resize.

Yeah does that occasionally, reboot and it should be fine.

[thedude459]

Shouldn't that be considered a bug if it freezes sometimes? Why does it freeze?

[IriDium]

(10th Nov, 2013 03:57 AM)thedude459 Wrote:  Shouldn't that be considered a bug if it freezes sometimes? Why does it freeze?

It should have been fixed in beta2

[thedude459]

I am on beta2 and it still happened. When I did the reboot like you said now it works.

[IriDium]

Ok it is a bug then. However it should have been posted in the beta2 post.

[thedude459]

I would post it but I can't give any details as to why it did what it did. The PI freezes so I can't get any details.

Thank you for your help though. Everything is up and running now.

[mk01]

@thedude459

with freezing you are referring to the boot process as you posted earlier? anything reoccurring (even you don't have detail) should be considered as a bug.

if you are still experiencing it, modify your cmdline.txt please by reomving "splash" and "quiet". try to do a picture of screen after freeze.


btw: btrfs can take whole disk and work with it (in general). this should be no problem for XBian itself, but for instance non existence of partitions will cause "SOMETHING" as initramfs boot process is simply doing a math with the partitions (not considering they don't exists).

there is "nosdcardresize" parameter to cmdline.txt causing this part of code being ignored completely.

[Poik]

I'm having a very frustrating time trying to get this to work. I have tried the script provided in this thread, as well as running the commands at http://wiki.xbian.org/USB_Installation, but I have not had any luck.

When the Pi starts initializing, it just gets to the end of the rootwait time and then says /dev/spa1 could not be found. I have tried increasing rootwait to 60, so I know this is not the problem.

If anyone could let me know what I am doing wrong I would be grateful.

Here are my drives. One thing that seems weird to me is that I have to mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 as /boot, it does not come up automatically like that.

Terminal

xbian@xbian ~ $ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 1.8G 1.3G 245M 84% /
udev 10M 4.0K 10M 1% /dev
tmpfs 188M 212K 188M 1% /run
/dev/mmcblk0p2 1.8G 1.3G 245M 84% /
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 188M 0 188M 0% /run/shm
none 100M 0 100M 0% /run/user
/dev/mmcblk0p2 1.8G 1.3G 245M 84% /home
/dev/sda1 7.4G 1.5G 5.3G 22% /mnt
/dev/mmcblk0p1 34M 11M 24M 32% /boot
xbian@xbian ~ $

This is my /dev/sda1/etc/fstab:

Terminal

#
#
#
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda1 / btrfs thread_pool=1,rw,compress=lzo,noatime,autodefra$
#LABEL=xbian-root-btrfs /home btrfs subvol=home/@,thread_pool=1,rw,compress$
UUID=8B12-9112 /boot vfat defaults,noauto,user,gid=0,uid=0 0 $

And this is my /boot/cmdline.txt:

Terminal

sdhci-bcm2708.sync_after_dma=0 dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=tty1 root=/dev/spa1 rootfsopts=noatime,compress=lzo,thread_pool=1,space_cache,autodefrag rootfstype=btrfs rootwait=60 smsc95xx.turbo_mode=N elevator=noop nohdparm splash logo.nologo quiet loglevel=0 noswap mod_scsi.scan=ssync

Hopefully I have just formatted something wrong somewhere, but I don't see where I have made a mistake.