Installing to, booting from SATA in Puppy 1.0.4

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danleff
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Installing to, booting from SATA in Puppy 1.0.4

#1 Post by danleff »

I have currently been able to get my Puppy to see and mount my sata drive. Puppy is installed on an IDE drive.

I am attempting to get Puppy installed on the sata drive and to run from Grub.

The two modules that are needed for my system are;

libata
sata_sil

I currently have the modules loaded in /etc/rc.d/rc.local.

Puppy was able to do an install on a partition on my sata drive.

However, Puppy won't boot, apparently as the new install on the sata drive does not have the modules installed to run at boot.

So, I installed Vector Linux to do a kernel compile and followed the recompile instructions that Barry has...no problem. Found the sata_sil module during the kernel compile, but I can't find libata in the kernel tree, during the recompile. It should be in the scsi subdirectory when doing make menuconfig, but it seems nowhere to be found.

Anyone have an idea where libata is resident, so I can add it directly, not as a module during the kernel compile?
I love it when a plan comes together

--Hannibal Smith

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BarryK
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#2 Post by BarryK »

Running "modprobe -vn libata" in Vector reports:

Code: Select all

/sbin/insmod /lib/modules/2.4.29/kernel/drivers/scsi/scsi_mod.o
/sbin/insmod /lib/modules/2.4.29/kernel/drivers/scsi/libata.o
For "modprobe -vn sata_sil":

Code: Select all

/sbin/insmod /lib/modules/2.4.29/kernel/drivers/scsi/scsi_mod.o
/sbin/insmod /lib/modules/2.4.29/kernel/drivers/scsi/libata.o
/sbin/insmod /lib/modules/2.4.29/kernel/drivers/scsi/sata_sil.o
You don't have to recompile the kernel:
If you have Unleashed, just place the modules in
puppy-unleashed/kernels/2.4.29/modules/0base_modules-2.4.29/lib/modules/2.4.29/scsi/
and compress them with gzip.
and run createpuppy script to create a new image.gz.
... createpuppy will run depmod, so the new modules will be recognised.

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danleff
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#3 Post by danleff »

Yep, this make more sense. The scsi_mod module is already there in Puppy Unleashed. I added libata and sata_sil.

I'm trying this out tonight and will report back.
I love it when a plan comes together

--Hannibal Smith

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BarryK
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#4 Post by BarryK »

I noticed there's a whole lot of sata_*.o modules, for example sata_via.o, so I guess if we are going to put sata support into Pup 1.0.5 then we would need all of those?

To boot off a sata drive... would you need a kernel parameter to load the sata module? ...or, would the kernel be able to do that automatically?

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danleff
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#5 Post by danleff »

This is what I was trying to get at. I knew that my sata chipset was sil, so I was golden setting up my IDE install to recognize the sata drive and partitions.

VectorLinux (STC RC2) has sata support built into both the 2.6.12 and 2.4.29-sata kernel. Unfortunately, it uses Lilo, which I am a bit rusty at now. I made a boot floppy by hand and need to look at this a bit. Even though I set the root=/dev/sdax properly, it still try to load the 2.6.12 kernel on the VectorLinux partition.

I have Linspire's Grub booting multiple Linux distros, but ran into problems here, as It was installed before I had the sata drive on my system. It does not have the /boot/grub/device.lst file that I am used to using to define the drive locations. I also had to disable their utility, called jiffyboot, as it kept changing all my other distros in grub to boot as chainloader +1. Not good.

I made a Puppy Unleashed cd with the modules placed, as suggested. However, you still have to modprobe them (except scsi_mod, which is "built in" and loads at boot time).

Once I sort this all out, I will post the results. I just assumed that the modules had to be compiled directly into the kernel, not as modules.
I love it when a plan comes together

--Hannibal Smith

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BarryK
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#6 Post by BarryK »

it's annoying, the documentation supplied with the 2.4.29 kernel source has nothing about sata.

So, maybe you are right, you need to compile it into the kernel to be able to boot from a sata drive.

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danleff
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#7 Post by danleff »

A little more information. I installed Fedora Core 4 with grub on a floppy.

I used Partimage to place my modified Puppy 1.0.4 install (from an image) on the sata drive, the one that had libata and sata_sil in /etc/rc.d/rc.local.

Modified Puppy's /etc/fstab to reflect root as sda5

Modified grub and tried to boot.

Kernel panic with a message that the kernel cannot open device ... sda5 is not a valid partition, to append root= to a valid partition.

The other Vector lilo boot floppy, of course, has the Vector (sata) kernel on the floppy. It booted Puppy on the sata drive, but failed to load the modules. It obviously was looking for the kernel 2.6.12 modules for Vector.

I'll keep looking and post any success.
I love it when a plan comes together

--Hannibal Smith

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danleff
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#8 Post by danleff »

I'm still working on this. I have beem able to re-compile the kernel from within Puppy 1.0.5a and get Puppy (with the recompiled kernel) to see the sata drives (dmesg), but lsmod still shows the modules being loaded, apparently through rc.modules and/or rc.sysinit and probepart and fdisk fails and hangs in the terminal window with the recompiled kernel. My regular vmlinux (Puppy stock) with the modules loaded manaully works fine.

I also need to figure out why grub will not boot the sata drive.

I'll post and success with this.
I love it when a plan comes together

--Hannibal Smith

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