Pendrive probs, multiple mounts of CDROM and unable to save

[voteslave]

Hi

I have just installed knoppix 5.1.1 on my USB pendrive (based on an article at www.tuxmachines.org), everything boots fine but i have some weirdness:


NB - during thr boot process i let it do everything itsled so didn't change (i thinK0 anything on the persistent home dir stuff where there was 4 options - how many of thesehome/systtem/overwrite/init should be ticked??

NNB - i am pretty new to linux so please be gentle

Anyway - here goes

1) Its dual boot system with several hard drives and if i click on the HDD icons on the desktop and try and unmount them i get a message that says Could not unmount - it seems /cdrom is mounted multiple times (if i click on them it seems to think the CDis mounted there as i only see the files on the CD and not whats actually on the hard drive). However if i open Konquerer i see all the hard drives and can access my windows data.

2) Anything i do is not saved e.g. documents, clock settings etc - i am pretty sure i must have done something wrong with the persistent disk image set up. The second partition on my pendrive just has the .img file on it - if i save stuff to this file does it become part of the image? I can copy files into the partition though it says the device is read only.

many thanks

[voteslave]

EDIT

Update

the previous post was on the basis that the persistent disk image choices ticked were 3 of the 4 - all except the 'overwrite' one


now - i had actually tried all 4 with ticks - i.e. with overwrite also selected
i just tried this again and it HAS remembered the stuff i set up before

HOWEVER, now i can't even access my other drives through Konqueror ( i get an error message about HAL) *

*edit* not quite true - its my sata drives that are messed up (sda and sdb), my IDE hard drive (hda) is fine
the pendrive is sdc1 and sdc2

i get the same messgaes about multiple mounts of the CDROM
only this time if i click on one of the HDD icons it also sets up (mounts?- (i can see new icons) CD-ROM(cdrom), DVD (hdd) and DVD (hdc).

any idea how i can sort this out?

and

anyway to make the boot choices stick - or does it remember what was input last time and keep that as a default?

thanks

[voteslave]

my syslinux.cfg file is as follows:

################################################## ################################################## ############
DEFAULT linux
APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=791 initrd=minirt.gz nomce loglevel=0 quiet BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix dma noeject noprompt home=/media/sdc2/knoppix.img
TIMEOUT 300
PROMPT 1
DISPLAY boot.msg
F1 boot.msg
F2 f2
F3 f3
LABEL knoppix
KERNEL linux
APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=791 initrd=minirt.gz nomce loglevel=0 quiet BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix
LABEL expert
KERNEL linux
APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=791 initrd=minirt.gz nomce BOOT_IMAGE=expert
LABEL memtest
KERNEL memtest
APPEND foo
LABEL knoppix-txt
KERNEL linux
APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=normal initrd=minirt.gz nomce loglevel=0 quiet BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix
LABEL debug
KERNEL linux
APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=normal initrd=minirt.gz debug BOOT_IMAGE=debug
LABEL fb1280x1024
KERNEL linux
APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=794 xmodule=fbdev initrd=minirt.gz nomce loglevel=0 quiet BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix
LABEL fb1024x768
KERNEL linux
APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=791 xmodule=fbdev initrd=minirt.gz nomce loglevel=0 quiet BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix
LABEL fb800x600
KERNEL linux
APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=788 xmodule=fbdev initrd=minirt.gz nomce loglevel=0 quiet BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix
LABEL dos
KERNEL balder.img
LABEL failsafe
KERNEL linux
APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us vga=normal atapicd nosound noapic noacpi pnpbios=off acpi=off nofstab noscsi nodma noapm nousb nopcmcia nofirewire noagp nomce nodhcp xmodule=vesa initrd=minirt.gz BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix
LABEL userdef
KERNEL linux
APPEND ################################################## ################################################## ########

THIS BIT WAS ADDED MANUALLY
dma noeject noprompt home=/media/sdc2/knoppix.img


AS A MATTER OF INTEREST CAN I JUST CHANGE us TO uk TO BOOT INTO A DIFFERENT (uk) LANGUAANGE/KEYBOARD?

thanks

[Quixand]

I'm having the same problem using the 5.1.1 dvd Knoppix distro and an 8gig Corsair VoyagerGT flash drive.
so far I have managed to changed ro mode to rw for my flash drive (sdb4 on my sys) as well as for the two partitions of my hard drive (sda2 and sda5), but only for and through the root.

when I type mount in root I get (this is from memory, as I haven't had the time to setup the network for it yet):
/dev/sda2 on /cdrom ntfs (ro,.... can't remember the rest)
/dev/sda5 on /cdrom ntfs (ro,.... same)
/dev/sdb4 on /cdrom none none (rw, open)
then there are the two cloops
and then the ###knoppix added
/media/sdb4 on /cdrom vfat (rw, ....,umask=000,... again can't recall the rest)
/cdrom on /media/sdb4 and same as above.

that's after I already did:
mount -o remount,rw /media/sdb4
mount --bind /cdrom /media/sdb4

At this point I can write to any of the drives from the root shell (including /cdrom), and only from there.

It's impossible to mount anything from the desktop, whenever I try it opens up the /cdrom dir

My guess would go toward the binding to the two sda partitions (my hdd with xp and storage partitions), but it's just a guess, as I'm still quite a newbie with Linux in general.

Oh, and my flash drive is formatted into one bootable partition (7.7GB), and boots in about 15 seconds, which is beautiful, but with out any form of rw, even to other drives, it kind of defeats the purpose.

[Quixand]

I have managed (though unable to recreate it so far), using a persistent image created with the dvd booted knoppix and saved on the flash drive, to get:
1. unbinding the cdrom from all media drives
2. adding another drive for the dvd on the desktop (no idea why or how it happened)
3. the two hdd partitions are now rw and open properly from the desktop (after unbinding from /cdrom and remount with rw,users,umask=999)

However, since the image is mounted as device bound to the flashdrive, I can't remount the flashdrive and set its read/write and user permissions.

I tried moving the persistent image to the hdd so that the flashdrive doesn't have anything permanent bound to it, but it just went back to having everything bound to /cdrom and read only.

I'll try it all again from scratch now, and this time save the image directly to hdd.

If I used a fromhd=... cheatcode for booting from the flashdrive, would that eliminate the /cdrom binding and read-only modes?

[Quixand]

Update: Not sure how relevant to this specific thread, but I think I solved the entire issue by redistributing the entire pendrive installation on my flash drive.
I did as follows:
1. format entire drive, make bootable (using whichever way you wish)
2. create second partition in roughly the size of your knoppix cd (dvd in my case) and copy the contents of the cd/dvd into it, then resize so you can squeeze all the free space back to the first partition.
3. copy the contents of the boot dir into the first partition, so it will boot to the knoppix cheatcode screen, then hand the process over to the full image in the second partition.
4. (optional) copy backed up contents of the data partition into the first partition.

Now the deal is simple: I want a data partition accessible on windows machines (with portableApps on it, of course), and I want the flash drive to boot knoppix where possible (depending on machine).

I'm not entirely sure how it will affect all the drives on desktop being mounted/bound to /cdrom, but I suspect that issue had much to do with the fact that the flash drive being an hdd and not the cd rom, or any cd rom for that matter, warped the way knoppix detects devices at startup and links them to the desktop.
Hopefully this will change for the better.
Might have to use fromhd= for this, haven't checked yet.

[Quixand]

OK ... That sort of works.

As for the devices on desktop all going to /cdrom issue:
By messing and fiddling about with the control center, after removing all the device icons from desktop, and adding the MOUNTED devices only, the devices on your desktop will link to their proper drives.
For some reason when knoppix loads it binds the /cdrom to both local hard drives (/dev/sda2 and 5) in my case, and I couldn't find a way to remove that.
They show on the mount details as:
/dev/sda2 on /cdrom type ntfs ... (ro, something.... )

then later down the /cdrom is bound to the usb partition with the cdrom files:
/media/sdb2 on /cdrom (ro)...

I found that if you mount the hard drives from the root shell, with rw permissions and all, then just use konqueror to go to storage media they open up just fine. (and their desktop icons too, but you would still have the original device/partition icons that lead to /cdrom unless you removed them).

I guess the easy way is to save your persistent home with all the desktop icons off, and write a bootup script to mount all the hard drives so they would show as they should on your desktop.

I'll keep on fiddling with this.