FC3 on external PCMCIA/USB disk (success)

[Milos Leskanic]

Michael J Gruber wrote:
> 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
> 

I'd be seriously interested - am trying to set up similar config (USB2
over PCMCIA) on FC4.

As a step 1, I tried to set machine up using built-in USB1.1 - for
unknown reason it doesn't work either. I'll elaborate a bit: Install
went flawlessly, FC4 sitting on external disk (/dev/sde1 as / plus
/dev/sde2 as swap, GRUB in MBR of external disk /dev/sde). Booted into
'linux rescue', mounted root partition and chrooted to it. Running
mkinitrd with following preloads: ehci-hcd, usb-storage, scsi_mod,
sd_mod. As it turns out later, FC4 puts "sleep 8" after usb-storage is
'insmodded'. Rebooting again, entering command-line mode of GRUB:

kernel vmlinuz-... ro root=/dev/sde1  should it be sde1 or only sde?
initrd initrd-usb.gz  customized initrd with above mentioned preloads
boot

For a while, everything looks fine - kernel uncompressed, USB storage
module registered; critical part: mkrootdev looks fine, but mount of
root FAILS with rc=6 (I believe I had rc=2 whilst using separate /boot
partition (have tried many variants of install)), kernel
(2.6.11-1.1369_FC4) spits out approx. 2 screens of garbage and machine
seems to hang. No idea why...

Questions in my mind: (i) what on the earth makes this not to boot
properly? Any missing preload? (ii) Once I make this work (if ever):
what needs to be preloaded for PCMCIA part? Or - maybe even better:
would it be possible to show relevant part of initrd script?

I'd be grateful for any hints, spent couple of days with no avail so far.

Thanks in advance,

Milos