Page 1 of 1

Installing straight to G drive???

Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 8:01 am
by godownnow2004
Ok I am new to the whole modded XBOX circle and i have questions. I want to install linux on it, but it needs to be on the G drive. How can i do this because when i run the install cd it seems to want to automatically install on the F drive. I am running dashboard MC360. So my questions are, how can i install Linux on my G drive?? Will I still be able to copy other files onto that drive such as music/pic/movies etc? Should i go with pro or media advantages/disadvantages? If anyone would be nice enough to help me I would greatly appreciate it and if this has been talked about a million times just give me a link to the discussion, THANKS!!!!

Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 8:08 am
by orochi
search.php

and look for "g AND drive"

I've never had a hard drive larger than 120gb so ive never tried anything with G drives

sorry bud

Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 9:19 am
by godownnow2004
orochi wrote:search.php

and look for "g AND drive"

I've never had a hard drive larger than 120gb so ive never tried anything with G drives

sorry bud


I did what you said, but couldn't really find anything that directly answered my questions.

Posted: Sat Dec 02, 2006 11:09 am
by dopey
Installing to the g drive is possible, but it's far from straight foward. Magic doesn't support it so you would have to do everything manually. If you aren't a very experienced Linux user I wouldn't recommend it.

Basically you would have to recreate the initrd and edit the linuxrc script inside it to point to the g drive and not the e or f drives. Place all the files that are in the cd, including your modified initrd file, in the root of G. You will also have to modify fstab in the rootfs file and create a new mount point for G. I can't remember exactly, but I believe Gentoox also modifies the checkroot init script to do some stuff specific to which drive the rootfs file is on. It's been a while since I attempted anything like this so I'm probably missing some stuff. Really, I discounted the whole Linux on the Xbox hard drive a while ago as Xfat is just way too slow; NFS is the way to go.

If what I said above completely confuses you then you really shouldn't attempt it. If you were able to follow it then good luck to you.

Posted: Sun Dec 03, 2006 12:27 am
by godownnow2004
I do appreciate the help, unfortunately that is a little over my head. Does anyone else have any thoughts???

Also what is NFS?

Posted: Sun Dec 03, 2006 8:04 am
by dopey
There isn't an easier way to do it, so I think your out of luck as to isntalling to G.

NFS is Network File System. If you have another linux desktop you can use that to host your root file system for Gentoox. Of course this is also a fairly complex procedure, but there is plenty of documentation on the subject. You would just have to setup your linux desktop to host the root filesystem (check the Gentoo Wiki for this), and then recompile the Gentoox kernel to support it (again in the Gentoo Wiki), edit the linuxboot.cfg to add the neccessary kernel command line options (you guessed it, in the Wiki), remove the initrd line from the linuxboot.cfg, edit the fstab so root points to the server (yep the Wiki), reboot and your good to go. If you just follow the Wiki How-To for a normal Gentoo installation you'll be OK. The only difference is you'll be editing linuxboot.cfg and not Grub's or Lilo's config, you'll probably want just a simple root files system instead of the multiple mount points it suggests, your "boot" partition is really non-existant on the Xbox as we use the root of any drive for it (you'll have to edit your fstab if it's not the e drive so it knows where to find the swap, however), and you might have to replace the checkroot init script with the one from a real Gentoo install (not Gentoox).

If you use NFS you'll still need to use an XFAT looback file for you swap, but that's for the most part ok. The speed increase I get by using NFS over the XFAT loopback for the root filesystem is huge. This is the only way I could figure out how to use MythTV on the Xbox while still leaving the rest of the Xbox intact to play games.