Re: [gentoo-amd64] boot Gentoo from USB key

[Jason <gentoo@lakedaemon.net>]

Raffaele BELARDI wrote:
...
> The kernel starts to load, but panics because it is unable to find the
> root partition. When it stops it shows the available partitions, these
> include all the hard disk partitions but no USB key partition. In fact,
> if I omit the 'root' parameter from the grub shell the boot works fine
> but it uses the hard disk root partition instead of the USB one.

You may want to look at specifying root by it's UUID.  This will prevent 
issues like the USB drive being /dev/sdg on one machine, /dev/sdb on 
another, and on reboot it all changing because the drives were detected 
in a different order.

>>From the log on the screen the USB controller seems correctly detected,
> so I don't understand why it is not finding the root. While writing this
> one idea comes to my mind, maybe it is failing because I attach the key
> to a SDC/MMC/USB card reader? This evening I'll try to plug it into a
> different USB slot.

In the past, instead of 'rootdelay=', I add a wait to the init script, eg:

while [ ! -e /dev/disk/by-uuid/1234-abcd-45gf-0659 ]
do
	sleep 0.1
done


hth,

Jason.
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