change usb-stick to sda

Hello everybody,

I have a goflex_home system. Now I am trying to produce a bootable usb-stick with debian following Jeff's tutorial.
I experienced two problems:
1 fdisk seems to fail in writing the fdisk changes finally so the usb-stick ends up with no valid partitions
The script seemed to work during installation, but finally the usb-stick didn't boot and contained no data.
2 I tried to do the fdisk from a debian installation on vmware player. This worked well, but the shellscript needs
the usb-stick to be sda - on my vmware image, sda is the OS while the stick is sdb. There is no editable part
within the installation script to change default to sdb. This make it impossible to install debian from a linux system
which is sda itself. Also, the HD needs to be removed on the goflex_home to make the usb-stick sda.
Is there a workaround for this problem or is there an alternative way to produce a bootable usb-stick with
debian for goflex_home?

Being a linux newbie I mostly need to follow tutorials to get things done properly.
The installation of squeeze server on the original OS failed due to lack of memory - which was the main motivation for
using an alternative OS. Another point is that the primary installation of the goflex_home demands registration of
email, HD-ID and passwords on a foreign server system which especially *now* doesn't seem politically correct knowing
what whistleblowers have been publishing, lately.

Thank you very much for your help!
asklepiades

asklepiades,

Take the 3.10.4 Debian rootfs in this thread, and put on USB stick. Boot with it, and then plug in the HDD.
http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,12096

After it's running, use the fw_printenv command in Debian to list your uBoot envs to see if you will need to adjust them (post them here and we'll help).

-bodhi
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bodhi, thank you for the fast reply. I did the partitioning from a VM and followed Jeff's script (with the HD removed) this time using the squeeze-version. As a result, the installation procedure finished properly, but the stick ist still not booting,
though the first partition is marked bootable. As far as I see it is Ext2 V2 formatted and the files are accessible.
It is possible that the two sticks I tried belong to those not working - bad luck in that case.

Do you think that following the procedure you quoted in your reply could make such a stick bootable?
Of course I will give it a try later.

bodhi, your image's format was not recognized by tar both on my VM and on the goflexhome
so I couldn't install the image on the prepared stick.

I used a third stick (which used to work well as a rescue system) with Jeff's script, but after it asked for
a reboot the original system was launched. During launch (both cold and warm start) the LED of the stick
didn't flash, as it seems, the USB-stick is not being accessed as first boot device presently.

I looked up the fw_printenv of the running goflexhome OS, maybe this can help:

bash-3.2# fw_printenv
Warning: Bad CRC, using default environment
bootcmd=bootp; setenv bootargs root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=${serverip}:${rootpath} ip=${ipaddr}:${serverip}:${gatewayip}:${netmask}:${hostname}::off; bootm
bootdelay=5
baudrate=115200

asklepiades,

You need to install bzip so tar can extract the archive.

Because you've run Jeff's script to install, uBoot image was written to NAND. So all you need is a working Debian rootfs for your box. And I created this rootfs for this purpose.

-bodhi
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