Hi,

was running debian from a usb stick with a FAT32 usb HD mounted atop the dockstar just using a fstab entry quite happily (though having apps crash with lack of memory) just by adding the following fstab entry (UUID being my specific drive) :

UUID=170B-2A73 /mnt/usb/mstore vfat rw,user,auto 0 0

and it worked fine till someone pointed out that (by typing free) that the swap file wasnt activated

so i added the following to my fstab :

UUID=37efcbf0-9dc9-4ad8-8496-e413dbdeecdf none swap sw 0 0

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and followed the following procedure :

Turn Swap off:
swapoff /dev/sdb2

make a new Swap-Partition:
mkswap /dev/sdb2

get the new ID:
blkid

copy the ID to clipbord

Edit fstab:
nano /etc/fstab

add a line like this (replace the UUID from the output of blkid:
UUID=ebd0ac1d-ec84-40e1-8827-80bfc1637cc6 none swap sw 0 0

turn swap on:
swapon -a

check if swap is working:
free


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Now when i boot with the hard drive attached then the dockstar wont boot, if i boot without the hard disk (just with the flash drive then it boots in to debian just fine (then as a test attaching the hd and doing a mount -a installs the drive just fine) .. its a real pain to do this every day though (or every reboot)

Does anyone know how to sort it out so it boots from the flash when the HD is attached and has an activated swap file on the flash drive ?

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currently typing blkid yields :


/dev/sda1: UUID="9c045daf-f869-448c-85c7-c773fb0c3272" TYPE="ext2"
/dev/sda2: UUID="37efcbf0-9dc9-4ad8-8496-e413dbdeecdf" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="HDDOCK" UUID="170B-2A73" TYPE="vfat"



thanks in advance for any ideas to solve it

rgds

ian

Ian, when you say that with the HD attached the Dockstar won't boot, do you know whether the problem is with uBoot not finding the uImage, or is it later in the boot sequence after control is handed off to the kernel? It's hard to believe that a bad swap partition would kill the boot; it would just not mount it and move on. A more likely candidate, I'd suspect, is that the /dev "disks" are being assigned backwards and thus the root file system would not be mountable. I suspect this is more likely to be due to your using UUID to find the partitions than it is due to swap. (Do you also use UUID to mount the root partition?)

Frankly, I've had bad luck with UUID on the SheevaPlug: Seems it searches all disk media, including attempting to probe the NAND devices, in an attempt to find all the UUIDs. But, whoever is doing this search is not too intelligent about how the NAND works, and manages to try a raw block read, which generates scads of read errors in the logs. I don't know if this works the same way on the Dockstar, and it probably isn't dangerous, just annoying, but I've avoided UUID entries in the fstab file for that reason.

Good luck with it.

Hi, I had the similar issue (I am not using UUID at all). I worked around the issue by attaching the USB stick (debian image) closest to Ethernet jack. With this setup, the USB stick is assigned with "sda", and Dockstar can boot to Debian every single time. I noticed if I have Debian bootable USB stick on a different USB connector, it may not get assigned with "sda", and I will get failure in boot process (initramfs prompt).

Kevin Ko Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hi, I had the similar issue (I am not using UUID
> at all). I worked around the issue by attaching
> the USB stick (debian image) closest to Ethernet
> jack. With this setup, the USB stick is assigned
> with "sda", and Dockstar can boot to Debian every
> single time. I noticed if I have Debian bootable
> USB stick on a different USB connector, it may not
> get assigned with "sda", and I will get failure in
> boot process (initramfs prompt).

Ran into this issue as well. Seems there is an order priority with some of the USB ports. I had to move mine closest to the ethernet jack as well to ensure that it gets SDA on boot... and I have to disconnect my LCD screen from the top mini USB jack when I do boot, or THAT gets SDA. Doesn't happen when the LCD is connected via the other two USB ports.