jacksonon
11-05-2005, 01:26 PM
Hi,
I'm going to be moving to a new city soon, which means I'll be without my computer for a few weeks. To get around that, I had the bright idea of ripping out my hard drive and putting it in a USB enclosure. Then I'd be able to use any computer anywhere - I'd just stick a boot CD in the CD drive and my USB enclosure in a USB socket, and tell the kernel to mount the USB drive with something like kernel root=/dev/sda1. It'd boot up my system with my Gnome layout and my home directory and so on, just as if it was my real desktop. Sounds good in theory.
I thought I'd try this with Knoppix as the boot CD, but it doesn't work. That is, there doesn't seem to be any boot option you can pass to Knoppix to tell it that after it's autodetected all the USB hardware, it should then mount a particular device as root and carry on from there, rather than mounting the compressed image on the CD. I remember that this used to be a really handy feature on the old Debian installation floppies, that I used it all the time to boot my system when I accidentally deleted the kernel, so I'm surprised it isn't available in Knoppix.
I should also mention that my desktop computer is fairly old and the BIOS can't boot directly from USB. I expect many other computers I may want to try this with will be in the same position, so I want to avoid any solution that requires BIOS USB booting.
Am I right that this isn't possible with Knoppix? If I'm wrong, I'd appreciate it if someone told me how it's done. Alternatively, if anyone knows of another live CD that allows this kind of thing, that'd be good too.
Thanks,
Matthew Exon
I'm going to be moving to a new city soon, which means I'll be without my computer for a few weeks. To get around that, I had the bright idea of ripping out my hard drive and putting it in a USB enclosure. Then I'd be able to use any computer anywhere - I'd just stick a boot CD in the CD drive and my USB enclosure in a USB socket, and tell the kernel to mount the USB drive with something like kernel root=/dev/sda1. It'd boot up my system with my Gnome layout and my home directory and so on, just as if it was my real desktop. Sounds good in theory.
I thought I'd try this with Knoppix as the boot CD, but it doesn't work. That is, there doesn't seem to be any boot option you can pass to Knoppix to tell it that after it's autodetected all the USB hardware, it should then mount a particular device as root and carry on from there, rather than mounting the compressed image on the CD. I remember that this used to be a really handy feature on the old Debian installation floppies, that I used it all the time to boot my system when I accidentally deleted the kernel, so I'm surprised it isn't available in Knoppix.
I should also mention that my desktop computer is fairly old and the BIOS can't boot directly from USB. I expect many other computers I may want to try this with will be in the same position, so I want to avoid any solution that requires BIOS USB booting.
Am I right that this isn't possible with Knoppix? If I'm wrong, I'd appreciate it if someone told me how it's done. Alternatively, if anyone knows of another live CD that allows this kind of thing, that'd be good too.
Thanks,
Matthew Exon