I would like to follow the USB storage howto to enable booting from the usb device on my Asus500gp with Kamikaze 8.09.1.
This is the link to the howto: http://wiki.openwrt.org/oldwiki/usbstoragehowto or http://oldwiki.openwrt.org/UsbStorageHowto.html

On Kamikaze 8.09.1 the content of the file /etc/init.d/rcS is:

>  #!/bin/sh
>  # Copyright (C) 2006 OpenWrt.org
> 
>  run_scripts() {
>          for i in /etc/rc.d/$1*; do
>                  [ -x $i ] && $i $2 2>&1
>          done | $LOGGER
>  }
> 
>  LOGGER="cat"
>  [ -x /usr/bin/logger ] && LOGGER="logger -s -p 6 -t sysinit"
> 
>  if [ "$1" = "S" ]; then
>          run_scripts "$1" "$2" &
>  else
>          run_scripts "$1" "$2"
>  fi

This differs optically so much from the /etc/init.d/rcS from the howto:

>  #!/bin/sh
>  # Copyright (C) 2006 OpenWrt.org
>  if test $2 == "boot" ; then
>  /etc/init.d/pivotroot
>  fi
>  {
>          for i in /etc/rc.d/$1*; do
>                  $i $2 2>&1
>          done
>  } | logger -s -p 6 -t '' &

I don't have much experience in writing scripts.
So I feel a little bit uneasily in just replacing the former with the latter one. ;-)

Can I just replace it - or should I take some changes?

(Last edited by theno on 10 Aug 2009, 23:02)

Well, now I gathered courage and tried the version from the howto for
/etc/init.d/rcS.

...But it didn't worked.

Because in my /etc/init.d/pivotroot one module (ehci-hcd for USB 2.0) was
missing. After fixing it the kamikaze is now booting from my (small) stick:

> root@OpenWrt:~# df -h       
> Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> rootfs                  121.0M     21.3M     93.5M  19% /
> /dev/root                 1.6M      1.6M         0 100% /mnt/rom
> tmpfs                    14.9M    720.0k     14.2M   5% /tmp
> /dev/mtdblock/4           5.7M      4.9M    792.0k  86% /mnt/jffs
> mini_fo:/jffs             1.6M      1.6M         0 100% /mnt
> /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1
>                         121.0M     21.3M     93.5M  19% /

nice

My pivotroot now looks like this:

> #!/bin/sh
> # change this to your boot partition
> boot_dev="/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1"
> # install needed modules for usb and the ext3 filesystem
> # **NOTE** for usb2.0 replace "uhci" with "ehci-hcd"
> # **NOTE** for ohci chipsets replace "uhci" with "usb-ohci"
> for module in usbcore ehci-hcd usb-ohci scsi_mod sd_mod usb-storage jbd ext2 ext3 ; do {
>         insmod $module
> }; done
> # this may need to be higher if your disk is slow to initialize
> sleep 4s
> # mount the usb stick
> mount "$boot_dev" /mnt
> # if everything looks ok, do the pivot root
> [ -x /mnt/sbin/init ] && {
>         mount -o move /proc /mnt/proc && \
>         pivot_root /mnt /mnt/mnt && {
>                 mount -o move /mnt/dev /dev
>                 mount -o move /mnt/tmp /tmp
>                 mount -o move /mnt/jffs /jffs 2>&-
>                 mount -o move /mnt/sys /sys 2>&-
>         }
> }
>

You all should look at the block-extroot package in trunk...

block-extroot looks very interesting as a pivot-root method.  Is there end-user documentation available for it?

E. g. here: http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/rootf … nalstorage

Theno, et al:

The block-extroot package in the trunk was designed for this. It is fully operational and has good documentation.

marc.