whole stock drive for a native fs

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menelik
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whole stock drive for a native fs

Post by menelik »

hey folks,

here is my prob: i dont wanna use the loop fs due to a great perf. loss. so i deciced to use a native fs. i know that this will work only beyond the 8gb barrier in general, but my idea was to make the whole stock drive to one main root fs + swap + bootpartition (if its needed, dunno?). i can do that as i have switchable drives. i thaught of using a bootcd eg. the gentoox bootcd to start that filesystem.
but how can i achieve that? plug the drive in my pc, make the partitions and move the rootfs of the gentooxcd on the drive?
any other clue to this?
ShALLaX
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Post by ShALLaX »

Im pretty sure this topic has been beaten to death already. Try searching around on the forums.
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menelik
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Post by menelik »

no, this topic hasnt been discussed deep enough. for example this is what you advised for such a sitation:

1) Boot your stardust cd
2) fdisk and format the drive
3) Mount the drive (mkdir /mnt/newdrive && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/newdrive)
4) Mount the CD (mount /dev/hdb /mnt/temp)
5) Decompress the distro.rar file (on the cd) to your newly formatted drive (cd /mnt/newdrive && unrar /mnt/temp/distro.rar)
6) Mount the rootfs (mkdir /mnt/loopback && mount -o loop /mnt/newdrive/rootfs /mnt/loopback)
7) Copy the contents of the mounted rootfs to your new drive (cp -avx /mnt/loopback /mnt/newdrive)

ok, thats fine. same way i'd go. but:

how do you wanna fdisk the whole drive when you even cant break the predefined partition table? i cant get access to the whole drive. i dont need c, e etc and yes, i do know that msdash wont work then. my plan is to get: 9,5 gb for hda2 with bootflag and 256mb as swap on hda1.

do i need to plug the drive into my pc to make new partitions?
nobspangle
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Post by nobspangle »

the predefined partition table is stored in the bios, you need to create a standard partition table on the disk it's as easy as the steps you have written.
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menelik
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Post by menelik »

is the system startable through the gentoox loader or do i have to run cromwell for this? im asking because the loader only got the option fatx or stardust...
nobspangle
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Post by nobspangle »

If you have the latest loader it should add an option for native providing you have an active partition.
If you keep an open mind, will your brain fall out?
menelik
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Post by menelik »

i've tried hours and cant get it working. here is what i've done:

made 2 partitions, hda2 linux native ext3 with boot flagand hda5 linux swap.
i copied all the files from distro to the harddisk and edited fstab.
now i wanna make a bootdisk to run it. i gave xebians bootdisk a try, it works except that vmlinuz is different due to different kernel versions. so i tried to replace that vmlinuz with the stardust one which didnt work. so i tried to work with stardust as bootdisk. i edited the linuxboot.conf on the bootdisk to:

kernel vmlinuz
append root=/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2 devfs=mount kbd-reset xbox=hdd
xboxfb y

i thaught that with this way i could let the gentoox loader think that it loads stardust but actually loads my partition. anyway, the loader wants its disk and dont accept it.
i also tried to make a bootdisk of the distro.rar except swap and rootfs. i edited the initrd to
mount -t reiserfs /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2 /ram
#mount -o loop /cdrom/rootfs /ram
but this doesnt work either as i dont have a native boot option at startup.
now i really dont have any idea how to solve this problem. i dont wanna use cromwell as my default bios and have to use a bootdisk. any clues?
menelik
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Post by menelik »

hi again,

solved the problem why the gentoox loader didnt see my native drive. i handt copied vmlinuz, initrd and linuxboot.cfg to the root of my dir. now it works very well.
is it possible to give c about 10 mb to load the gentoox loader from it? im not surer how to mix up the partitions as they are predefined if used with the standards.
nobspangle
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Post by nobspangle »

why don't you just flash the loader on to your modchip/tsop?
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menelik
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Post by menelik »

cause i need my actual bios for other purposes, xbmc for example ;)

the bootdisk works very fine. a 10 mb boot fatx partition would be much nicer too ;)
nobspangle
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Post by nobspangle »

In that case I would just boot gentoo from a CD
If you keep an open mind, will your brain fall out?
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