| Matthew Rosewarne on 30 Dec 2007 13:25:03 -0800 |
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On Sunday 30 December 2007, Ian Reinhart Geiser wrote: > I am trying to install Debian sarge to a compact flash device so that I can > boot my host PC from it. I am trying to use > "http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/apds03.html.en"; and > "http://feraga.com/library/howto_install_debian_linux_onto_a_usb_thumb_driv >e_with_the_root_partition_encrypted_using_uuids_initramfs_tools_dm_crypt" as > a base reference, but when I get to the point of booting the actual linux > kernel i see the following errors: > pivot_root: No such file or directory > /sbin/init: 432: cannot open dev/console: No such file > Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init! Debian Sarge is awfully old, I doubt this will work on Sarge without serious fiddling. It would be quite possible to do it on etch, though. As far as I'm aware, you can install directly to a USB stick directly from the usual debian-installer, so there isn't really a need for that howto unless you wanted to do it manually. The error you're seeing is happening in the initramfs. When the kernel is started by the boot loader, it uses the initramfs image as a temporary root fs which contains only whatever is needed to get to the real root fs. Your initramfs image is for whatever reason not being built correctly. Perhaps you should try using initramfs-tools instead of yaird and see if it makes any difference. Once this is fixed, you'll hit another issue of putting Linux on USB sticks, which is that of wear. The boot process alone creates and removes lots of tiny files, and that will cause write failures on flash memory after a relatively short time. There are two methods I can think of to get around this problem: 1. Use a special wear-levelling filesystem, such as JFFS2 (like in the OLPC), instead of the usual filesystems (ext, xfs, jfs, and so on). This will help alleviate the wear problem. 2. Use a ramdisk and unionfs, like Debian-live or other live distros do. This approach entirely eliminates the problem of wear, but has the downside of not keeping the changes across reboots. For a stable distro like Etch, that's not all that important, since you probably won't be modifying it that often. If you went this route, you'd probably want to use live-helper instead of the debian-installer or that howto. Attachment:
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