[livemedia-discuss] Re: Announcement : LiveUSB scripts for Belenix

[Moinak Ghosh]

Gary Speechley wrote:
> Greetings!
>
> Many thanks for the usbdump script.
>
> I've managed to get belenix up and running ona LaCie 8GB Oragne Carte drive (an embedded Seagate 7.xGB drive) but I did have a problem with installgrub.
>
> I tried installations using a number of different machines (desktop and laptop) but all I would get on booting was a "GRUB" message prompt and no further progress.
>
> Thanks to a posting elsewhere that mentioned installgrub I was able to get a bootable drive. I had to refer to the [b]stage1[/b] and [b]stage2[/b] files from [b]/.cdrom/boot/grub[/b], however.
>
> I have an old(-ish) 1GB Talent USB key and I've had no success installing on that. Even with the installgrub trick, errors occurred trying to reference [b]s2[/b] of the [b]rdsk[/b], not [b]s0[/b] as I had stated in the command line. There seemed to be confusion between a slice and the whole drive, that I wasn't able to resolve.
>   

   This has been fixed. I will upload a modified usbdump script today. 
The problem was that
   the script was using the physical media capacity reported by rmformat 
for calculating the
   slices, whereas it should be formatted capacity. Formatted capacity 
is somewhat less than
   physical capacity. So the slices were falling off the partition boundary.

   I have modified the script to use fdisk -W that reports formatted 
capacity. Testing on a 2GB
   USB flash disk was successful without any boot problems.

> I'm trying to play with zfs (to set up a simple home NAS booted from USB).
>
> Having booted from the 8GB USB drive, I created a zfs pool and file system that seemed to work - I could read a file I'd created, but when I rebooted, zfs was gone. In it's place was the original ufs-mounted drive at /mnt/solaris4.
>   

   The is the same feedback I got from another person. The current plan 
is to modify the script
   to allow creating 2 data slices and format one with either UFS of 
ZFS. A small change is
   required in a startup script (svc:/system/device/local) in order for 
the ZFS slice to be
   auto-mounted at every boot. The zpool name will have to be stored in 
a file on the other
   slice and this can be used by zpool import -R to import the pool 
using alternate root during
   boot.

> However, I can see that progress is being made. If anything, I'd appreciate a smaller image (to fit a 512MB memory key) and the ability to have zfs persist across reboots.
>   

   This is another RFE that is being looked at. With the Solaris Express 
LiveMedia it can be
   done using a smaller custom package list. With BeleniX it requires a 
different approach
   by generating a filtered file list.

Regards,
Moinak.

> Cheers! Gary
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