[ydl-gen] Booting a PS3 w/YDL6 from an external USB drive

[Bill Mueller]

I haven't tried it recently, so no solid answers forthcoming.
But hopefully I can add some insight.

Your RH/Fedora friends are correct, the trick with booting
from usb storage devices require the usb drives to be 
re-scanned after nash starts up for the drive to mount
correctly.  

The easiest way to do it is by loading the kernel module, but
I believe you can also do it through the /proc tree.

I had thought the ydl6 initrd already incorporated this, 
given it is based on the same one used for the installer.

In either case, if it is not working the fix is not exactly
straight forward.  Mount the initrd and edit the startup
script to re-scan the usb devices or insert re-compiled
usb-core and usb-storage modules.

I'm not sure I will be able to address this until the next
release.

-Bill

On Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:59:06 -0400, Rob Sanders <rarob at comcast.net> wrote:
> Hey everybody,
>    Has anyone played around with using an external USB drive on the  
> PS3 with YDL6?  I tried installing
> to one and that seemed to go well, but the drive will not boot the  
> PS3.  Kboot is correctly mounting the
> first partition of the external drive and sees the yaboot.conf file,  
> but once nash starts up the boot freezes
> quickly.
>    Based on some co-workers who boot RH/Fedora from USB drives, it  
> looks like the initrd image is missing
> the usb-storage modules.  One buddy said that for their RH/Fedora  
> boxen they *had* to have the usb-storage
> stuff built as a module, *not* compiled into the kernel.  I'm hoping  
> that someone else has been down this
> path w/YDL before, and can confirm/deny this.
>    Tomorrow morning I'm going to start playing with stuff.  I'm  
> figure I'm going to build a stock YDL6 kernel on
> my PS3's internal drive with usb-storage as a module, repackage with  
> mkinitrd as per some RH/Fedora
> cheat sheets I've found, and push that to the external drive....
> 
> 
> Rob
> 
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