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

[Rob Sanders]

Hello again,
   After playing around with this and learning all sorts of neat  
things that I didn't know
about kernel rebuilding I determined that those steps are not  
needed.  Below are
very simple steps for getting a bootable external USB drive with the  
PS3 and YDL6.
The basic failure seems to be the system not waiting long enough for  
the USB drive
to report in.

-Rob



TSS - feel free to modify these directions as you see fit if you'd  
like to put them on the
support pages.  I'm guessing the changes for a subsequent YDL release  
are trivial.

=======
I grabbed these commands after looking at the difference between the
initrd images of the stock PS3 install and one with USB storage built as
a module.

Step 1 - Use the PS3 to install YDL6 to the external drive
Step 2 - with the external drive connected, reboot using the
          install DVD
Step 3 - the name of the external drive will be shown before the  
kboot prompt, it should
          be a line like '[sda] Attached SCSI disk'.  I've seen sda  
for a 20GB PS3, and sdd for a
          60GB ps3.  If you miss this, then you can get the name from
          looking at the output of 'dmesg' before doing step 5.  The  
remainder of these directions
          assume that it was 'sda'.
Step 4 - bring up an alternate console using ctrl-alt-fn 2
Step 5 - mount the boot partition of the external drive.  This should  
be the first partition,
          hence /dev/sda1
             mkdir /mnt/extboot
             mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/extboot
Step 6 - grab the default initrd image and unpack it
          cp /mnt/extboot/initrd-2.6.23-9.ydl6.1.img /tmp/initrd.gz
          gunzip initrd.gz
          mkdir work
          cd work
          cpio -id < ../initrd
Step 7 - edit init and insert the follow lines after 'insmod /lib/ 
ehci-hcd.ko'
             mount -t usbfs /proc/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb
             stabilized /proc/bus/usb/devices
Step 8 - repackage this into a new initrd file and put back onto the  
boot partition
          find . | cpio -o -H newc > ../initrd_mod
          cd ..
          gzip -9 initrd_mod
          cp initrd_mod.gz /mnt/ext_boot/initrd-2.6.23-9.ydl6.1.img
Step 9 - reboot