[NTLUG:Discuss] Booting FC7/8 from USB thumbdrive

[Leroy Tennison]

Robert Citek wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
>  Has anyone here successfully booted Fedora Core 7or Fedora Core 8
> from a USB thumbdrive?
> 
> I installed FC7 to an internal drive and then imaged the partition to
> a USB thumbdrive with grub in the MBR.  When I boot from the
> thumbdrive, grub comes up and it even loads the kernel.  But then
> kernel panics as it cannot mount several items including /dev/root.
> 
> I plugged the thumbdrive into my Ubuntu machine to read the grub.conf
> and the fstab
> 
> $ sudo grep -v '^#' /media/sdb1/boot/grub/menu.lst
> default=0
> timeout=5
> splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
> hiddenmenu
> title Fedora (2.6.21-1.3194.fc7)
>        root (hd0,0)
>        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7 ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet
>        initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7.img
> 
> $ sudo grep -v '^#' /media/sdb1/etc/fstab
> LABEL=/1                /                       ext3    defaults        1 1
> tmpfs                   /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
> devpts                  /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
> sysfs                   /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
> proc                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
> 
> I'm experiencing the same thing with FC8.
> 
> This post in the forums sound really close to the problem I'm
> experiencing, although I'm not using LVM:
> 
> http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=169203
> 
> Regards,
> - Robert
> 
> _______________________________________________
> http://www.ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
> 

I noticed no one else has replied yet, this may be "fools rush in where 
angels fear to tread" but I'll throw out a couple of ideas.

First, is the partition on the thumb drive labeled '1' (without quotes)? 
  The reason I ask is that I just don't know what gets copied with a 
partition image.

My second concern would be with the nodes (the files that aren't really 
files under /dev since you're having trouble there).  You may have to 
use mknode to create some of them.  Unfortunately, if you do you're on 
your own because I've reached the limit of my knowledge about cloning OS 
partitions.

Third idea is to mount initrd and look at see if there are any 
references to what's there - anything in the scripts, etc. that doesn't 
exist on the thumb drive.  Again, this is a wild guess type of thought.

Other things which might give some clues are what does get mounted 
before the kernel panic and what the kernel panic message is.

If/when you get resolution please share with the rest of us.  I'm 
thinking about imaging my root partition, wiping the drive and 
installing CentOS 5.1.  I really don't need to have these kinds of 
problems if i went to restore...