Re: [gentoo-user] Booting Gentoo from USB stick

[J. Roeleveld]

On Wednesday 22 September 2010 06:36:50 Jake Moe wrote:

<snipped>

> Well, now that I've managed to get it booting, the only problem is that
> I can't seem to get the disk label working right.  In GRUB's menu.lst,
> if I use root=LABEL=UsbRoot, it doesn't work (kernel panic, label not
> found, but sda1 is listed as available), but if I use root=/dev/sda1, it
> works.  However, later in the boot process, it mounts / using
> LABEL=UsbRoot in fstab just fine.  Is that a problem with GRUB?  Or the
> kernel?  Or am I doing something else wrong?

I think someone mentioned earlier in this thread that "label" support for boot 
requires an initrd (ramdisk) to work. This could be what you're running into?

> And for future reference, while looking into various things for this, I
> found these in the Gentoo Wiki:
> USB Portable Install - http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/USB_Portable_Install
> Portable USB Gentoo - http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Portable_USB_Gentoo
>
> Unfortunately, both use genkernel instead of manually configured
> kernels, so that part doesn't help, but one mentions the option
> "scandelay=2" to add to the kernel boot line in GRUB to introduce the
> delay genkernel needed to see the USB device; would have been good to
> know that last week when I was trying genkernel.  :-P

That is something I noticed for a few Howto's, genkernel is used quite often, 
but I actually haven't seen the need for it myself yet.

But I am glad to hear you managed to get it working.
Did you try trimming down your kernel a bit more to see what the minimum 
required is? :)

--
Joost