FC3 on external PCMCIA/USB disk (success)

[Michael J Gruber]

Hi everyone,

I'm using an external USB disk, with the USB 2.0 controller being a 
PCMCIA card. FC3 installed happily on this disk, alas it didn't boot 
quite as happily from it. (Of course, I have grub on a /boot partition 
of the internal IDE drive.)

Earlier Fedora versions came with the pcinitrd script of pcmcia-cs which 
facilitated the creation of initrds for booting with PCMCIA, FC3 doesn't 
have it. Documentation one gets from googling mostly refers to 2.4 
kernels, where one has to hack /linuxrc to include cardmgr...

After experimenting a while with hacking /linuxrc and /init, I found out 
that mkinitrd (which comes with FC3) already does the job, as long as 
one is aware of the timing problem: PCMCIA and USB need some time to 
come up before devices will be recognized.

Also, minitrd's option --with-usb always puts usb modules before modules 
you specify with --with=, which is a bad thing in this case. So, just 
put the usb modules after the pcmcia modules, using --with=usb-storage 
etc. mkinitrd includes a "sleep 5" after loading usb-storage, and this 
does the trick.

If enough people are interested I'll write up some more details.

Michael