USB Drive

[harryhood]

I just bought a Sony 512MB Microvault USB pen drive. Knoppix 3.8.1 calls it Hard Disk Partition uba1. PC is a thinkpad
R31. I did set up for a home directory on this drive. Do I boot with home=/mnt/uba1/knoppix.img ?
I thought USB devices were called sda1. What does uba signify?

[eco2geek]

I did set up for a home directory on this drive. Do I boot with home=/mnt/uba1/knoppix.img ?
Yes. (And if Knoppix doesn't automagically detect your USB flashdrive, try the "noapic" cheatcode.)

I thought USB devices were called sda1. What does uba signify?
USB devices, from Knoppix 3.7 on, have device nodes of ubXy instead of sdXy. (In my limited experience, other Linux distros with kernel 2.6 are heading in this direction as well.) Since "sdxx" usually represents SCSI devices, differentiating them from USB devices is not a bad idea.

[harryhood]

Thanks eco2,
I had to give up on the persistent /home deal. It kept hanging the PC. The usb light
would come on and then I couldn't get any other programs to run or even log out. This
would happen while using Firefox, unable to get any sites to load was the symptom.
I'm going to try CTRL-ALT-ESC to kill Firefox next time and see what happens.
CTRL-ALT-BKSPACE would quit and try to shut down, but it would hang when
trying to unmount.

Using the USB to save a config works fine only if I use: myconfig=/dev/uba1, /mnt gives
errors.

Any idea why the /home would cause a hang?

[Alan Harrison]

Hi Harry,

I've created a persistent home directory on a 512MB USB drive and, so far, no problems. I've been using it for a couple of hours now, I've ended and restarted a session and everything seems fine. First boot, I used home=scan, second boot it found the USB home directory itself. One minor niggle, I can't seem to find an equivalent of Windows "Standby" for closing the machine without turning off. I'm sure there must be one. If I can't findit I'll post.

Cheers

[eco2geek]

Any idea why the /home would cause a hang?
Personally, no. (The shutdown scripts in Knoppix 3.8/CeBit edition were screwed up and would hang with a persistent home, but it didn't affect Knoppix's normal operation, and that's been fixed in 3.8.1.)

On one computer, Knoppix won't detect the USB key unless I use the "noapic" cheatcode.

And don't forget you can go to a full-screen console with Ctrl+Alt+F1 thru Ctrl+Alt+F4, and bounce between graphical mode and text-only mode (without shutting down) by typing "init 2" and "init 5" at the command line.