FreeagentGO / Warm boot vs cold boot?

As suggested elsewhere, I purchased a FreeAgentGO hard drive. I partitioned it, then copied my working debian install from my flash drive to the hard drive. However, when I try to boot from the hard drive, I can only boot up in pogoplug, i.e. root@Pogoplug:

1) Does anyone have any guesses on why I am not about to boot into Debian, and what I can do about it? I recently changed my arcNumber (fw_setenv arcNumber 2998), could that have anything to do with it?

2) I see lots of discussion on the forums about warm boot vs cold boot, but I haven't been able to find a clear description anywhere of the differences, or how one warm boots into Debian from Pogoplug. Can someone point me toward a reference?

Thanks in advance.

A cold boot is a boot from which power has been applied to the Dockstar. A warm boot is one where either another OS is running and a "reboot" is given, without recycling power, or perhaps one where the uBoot has been interrupted and a "reset" command issued from there.

geodog, you haven't given us a lot to go on. Reading between the lines, I take it that your Dockstar eventually boots from the NAND, right? On it's own? Do you have netconsole set up? If you do, can you give us the output? How about the uBoot's environment? And the output of "fdisk -l" on the GO drive. Stuff like that would be helpful.

My apologies. The lack of information comes from my ignorance. Most of what I have learned comes through these forums, but it is kind of hit or miss, since there isn't a lot of other documentation. I wasn't even aware that there was a reboot command.

I attached my new hard drive (with the partitions copied over from my working flash drive). I power up my Dockstar. The "Debian" hostname never shows up in my device list (neither does PogoPlug), but using the MAC address I locate the IP address for the Dockstar and SSH in. When I do, I get the prompt root@Pogoplug, which I assumes means that I am booting off the internal NAND? I haven't done anything to my internal flash other than run Jeff's original script.

I reboot. No difference. Filesystem information as follows

Quote

root@Pogoplug:/ $fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059349504 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 30369 30401 265072+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/sda2 * 1 3070 24659743+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 3071 8169 40957717+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 8170 30368 178313467+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

Partition table entries are not in disk order

root@Pogoplug:/ $df
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mtdblock2 32768 23100 9668 70% /
none 63028 4 63024 0% /tmp
root@Pogoplug:/ $cat /etc/fstab
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=4,mode=620 0 0

I don't have netconsole setup yet, nor do I know how get the UBoot environment, but I will try to set netconsole up in the near future, and if you can tell me how to get the Uboot environment info, I will get that as well.

Thank you for you generosity with your time and expertise. If you have a favorite doc site to point me at, I would be happy to look there for answers.

geodog Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I don't have netconsole setup yet, nor do I know
> how get the UBoot environment, but I will try to
> set netconsole up in the near future, and if you
> can tell me how to get the Uboot environment info,
> I will get that as well.
>

If you have installed Jeff's uboot then you should be able to print the uboot environment from the pogoplug prompt by typing in the following:
fw_printenv

I see you have your Linux swap partition defined as /dev/sda1 and your (presumed) Linux root partition defined as /dev/sda2. That's backwards from the normal arrangement. Is that the way it is on your thumb drive, too? What does your /etc/fstab say? If it points to /dev/sda1 as your root partition, as it normally would, this could be your problem.

Started from scratch with my hard disk, repartitioned sda1 as ext2, sda2 as swap, sda3 as ext3, and sda4 as ntsfs, and recopied from my flash drive using dd. Takes longer than the flashdrive to boot up, and need to make sure no other disks connected, but otherwise works like a charm.

Thank you so much for your patient assistance.