Boot Linux from a FireWire Device
By Martyn Honeyford2005-04-12
Installation
The easiest way to install Linux these days (certainly in my opinion), is to connect all of your hardware (in my case, this consisted of plugging in the PCMCIA FireWire card, attaching the FireWire cable to the PCMCIA card and the drive, and turning on the drive's power switch); then boot up your machine with the installation CD from your distribution of choice.
My distribution of choice is Gentoo (see Resources for a link), so I used the latest "Universal" x86 Live CD (2004.1). The steps required for other distributions should be more or less comparable to those outlined here.
Once you have booted with the install CD, with a bit of luck it should have recognized your drive. The drive should appear as a disk under /dev/sdX, where X is a lowercase letter starting at "a." On my system, the external drive was detected as /dev/sda, but this will vary if you have other SCSI disks (or emulated SCSI disks); in that case, it might be /dev/sdb or some other letter. If your drive is not detected automatically, some further steps may be required -- for instance, you might have to pass boot options to enable FireWire or PCMCIA, or you might have to manually load some kernel modules, or other things of that sort (see Resources for links to troubleshooting guides).
Once the drive has been recognized, it should behave exactly like an internal hard drive as far as the rest of the installation is concerned; so you should be able to partition it as required and install Linux as normal.
One word of caution, however: care needs to be taken when deciding on where to install the boot loader (usually GRUB or LILO) -- I would recommend not installing it in the Master Boot Record (MBR) (which is usually the default). Rather, it should be installed in the root partition (or boot partition, if you use a separate one) of the external drive.
Now that we have Linux installed on the device, we want to boot it up. This is where things can start to get a little tricky.
Tutorial pages:
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First published by IBM DeveloperWorks
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