When you say "Boot from USB", does this also mean it will work booting from an SD(HC) card?

albkwan,

When I made a USB recovery stick from the Recovery DVD/CD which came with my 900 Linux model,  and used it to restore.  It did not touch my 16 GB drive.  It only restored the 4 GB drive.

Others have reported in other threads that the 701 USB restore restores BOTH disks but the 900 USB restore restores only the main drive.

If this is true, will this affect this installation procedure?  Anybody try it with a 900 yet?

Hope wrote:

albkwan,
Both links point to the same file - easybootusb.tgz
Where is the easyinstall2usb.tgz file??

Oh! It's a typo. Because the first server blocks the download, I have changed the filename and put it up in another server. I have corrected the typo.

enCrypt wrote:

When you say "Boot from USB", does this also mean it will work booting from an SD(HC) card?

Yes, including SDHC, USB flash disk, USB hard disk ... , any storage device that can boot from USB.

brucine wrote:

Maybe not such a good idea to use the recovery stick as an install stick: people not having an external usb dvd drive and having wiped xandros from the ssd (no F9) might have to use, of course not simultaneously, both a recovery disk and an install disk, which would lead to the making of two sticks, one not modified for recovery, and the other modified for your procedure.

You can use it both as Asus Eeepc System Recovery Disk and install disk for Boot Xandros from USB. Just keep a copy of the original /boot/initrd.gz, say rename it to initrd.gz.orig. And when you need to restore SSD, rename it back and then it is the original Asus Eeepc System Recovery Disk.

Hope wrote:

albkwan,

When I made a USB recovery stick from the Recovery DVD/CD which came with my 900 Linux model,  and used it to restore.  It did not touch my 16 GB drive.  It only restored the 4 GB drive.

Others have reported in other threads that the 701 USB restore restores BOTH disks but the 900 USB restore restores only the main drive.

If this is true, will this affect this installation procedure?  Anybody try it with a 900 yet?

In fact, the first part of the System Recovery process is the same for both 701, 900 and 1000h (and I suppose for all Eeepc models). The bootscript boots up from USB drive, seek volume label to mount itself, then dd the p701L.gz image to sda (the 1st SSD). But the p701L image actually only contains the MBR and sda1 (the SYSTEM partition). So only MBR and sda1 is created. The only difference is the p701L.gz image for 1000h is much bigger (almost 2 GB).

It is the 2nd part of the bootscript that run fdisk to create sda2 (the USER partition), and other partitions like sda3, sda4 and format sdb1, the HOME partition, for 900 and later models with 2 SSD. For 701 models, there is no 2nd SSD, so this part of the code is missing in the original bootscript.

Now that I only want to build Xandros on an USB device (e.g. on an SDHC), I don't need partitions sda3 and sda4, and also I don't need to format sdb1, the HOME partition. And I don't touch the 1st SSD at all. But during the install process, when you are asked to select the target USB drive, you can choose to install to sdb (i.e. the 2nd SSD for 900 and later models). It is up to you.

I am not sure about the cause of the strange behaviour of the Asus System Recovery Disk reported in the forum. But what I have found out working on this hack is that the original bootscript is buggy and is not reliable. Once I have booted up with a blank SD and the Recovery USB disk plugged in, but the bootscript mounted the blank SD (instead of mounting itself) in /xan. So in the end, I have rewritten the codes for seeking volume label and mounting the Recovery disk.

Also, I have noticed that some people have reported errors like "cannot stat sda2" during the Asus System Recovery process and subsequently the fdisk process failed in creating sda2. To my opinion, this is because there are some other partitions existing in sda that was still mounted. In such case, at the end, fdisk will refuse to write the new partition table to the disk. It leads me to think that the bootscript somehow found the other partitions and mounted them, which I think is another bug.

Anyway, most of the codes have been rewritten and I have tested them section by section and also in actual creating Xandros on USB with the P701L.gz image from my 4G 701, a 900 and the 1000H hosted by Ectoplasm and Ottothecow.

The only thing I have not been able to test is with a 2nd SSD which I don't have on my 4G.

Hope wrote:

Got a bunch of errors on bootup. EXT2-fs error bad page constant scrolling of bad page errors.
I have a pretty bad sdhc card - DaneElec 4GB SDHC - that's the card I was trying to install to.  Will try with a USB sstick later but I really don't have any good ones so don't have much hope for it.

Yes, bad SDHC cards will not work. Even if you succeed going thru the process, it will be a pain running Xandros on it.

When I am finished with this procedure and have a working Xandros on a USB, can I play around with the internal SSDs as I like? Like formating, repartitioning, etc.?

(on a 901)

UPDATE

I have worked out how to do the same for the xepc recovery disk. Same procedure but different files to download:
easybootusb-xepc.tgz  contains the boot scripts, and eeepc-bootusb-xepc.tgz contains the 4 files necessary to boot xepc.org upgraded Eeepc Linux from USB. [NB. Both 701 and 901 version are supported.] [EDIT 2009/8/16: Changed download link to www.mediafire.com.]

Same as before, unzip easybootusb-xepc.tgz  to root folder of the USB Recovery disk, and eeepc-bootusb-xepc.tgz to the folder /runscripts/bootusb-xepc/, then reboot and select 2 at the task menu.

The advantage of using the xepc recovery disk is that you will have many more free disk space, and programs are latest versions. But it runs much slower than default Xandros. So, there are pros and cons.

====================

For creating the USB System Recovery disk from the xepc-recovery-xxx.iso, here are the steps:

1) Extract files from the xepc-recovery-xxx.iso image to your USB System Recovery disk. You can either first burn a DVD and copy from the DVD, or if you have a CD Image handling tool, you can directly extract from it.

2) Run makeboot.bat in the USB disk to make the USB disk bootable. [NB. Do not run the makeboot.bat in the DVD, you will wipe out the MBR on your desktop drive doing this.]

3) Rename vmlinuz.usb to vmlinuz. [NB. This step is only required for the 701 iso.]

4) Backup initrd.usb if you want to use it to recover your SSD later.

5) Extract the files you have downloaded to the USB disk. Pls note that initrd.usb should go to the root folder instead of to /boot.

6) IMPORTANT: Change the volume label of the USB System Recovery disk to EEEPC. Otherwise it won't be able to mount itself in /xan.

Then you are ready for building xepc recovery disk on USB.

Last edited by albkwan (2009-08-16 11:06:20 am)

Hello dudes,

I wanted to install Xandros in my SDHC 16 Go card (since I've got XP on SSD), I followed this tutorial :

http://eeepc.fire.prohosting.com/easybo … tusb.htm#4

BUt when I'm stuck on "expect to write 75305 records of 32k" ... is it long ?
I'm waiting for 10 minutes right now and no changes ...


THanks.

alucard_xs wrote:

BUt when I'm stuck on "expect to write 75305 records of 32k" ... is it long ?
I'm waiting for 10 minutes right now and no changes ...

It depends on which iso you are using and the speed of your SDHC. The 1000H iso is almost 2GB whereas the 901 and 701 iso are slightly less than 1GB, it will take double the time to write this to your SDHC.

Also, when I tested this with a Class 6 SDHC and with a mini-SD, the time difference is almost 4x.

SchneidersWay wrote:

Whats the difference/advantages to with/without unionfs?

The advantage in using unionfs is the possibility to F9 restore which many beginners have found this very useful. But with a SDHC, you can easily backup the contents of the SDHC in your desktop, so unionfs is not that necessary.

Also, unionfs will make it very difficult to tweak your system. Upgrading software will take up much more additional space. So, if you are the kind who want to tweak your system very often (and have the knowledge to do this), then prehaps no unionfs is better. But if you just want to use the Eeepc as it is, then unionfs is better.

Another point: Unionfs is very sensitive to filesystem errors. So, running default Xandros with unionfs on a poor quality SDHC is a pain.

I did the whole process successfully.
The system booted up ok.

Unfortunately it shows a user password screen before I enter Xandros.
I tried to use my root password, but it didn´t work out.

Does anybody know which password is it?
Is it a default password?

Thanks,
Romulo

I followed the instructions and have it all on a 4gb sdhc it boots to a command prompt   

grub>


Should it go further and otherwise, what should i type at the prompt?

@albkwan
I succeeded in creating a Xandros sd boot disk by using a USB media card reader.  It was much faster to create and the sd card seems to work okay,  but it is just an original Xandros with nothing modified.  How do I copy over my disk 1 and disk 2 files over to make it an exact mirror of my VERY modified Easy Mode Xandros?
I tried Acronis but it only gives me the choice of restoring to the physical disk 1 and disk 2 NOT the sd card.

I also tried something crazy like trying to reinstall Opera to the sd card,  but it asked for a password and the one I use for my main Xandros install does not work.  What is the password?

You said you use this as a mirror copy of your setup...how do you do that?

Last edited by Hope (2008-09-27 3:41:59 pm)

albkwan wrote:

zelig wrote:

I followed the instructions and have it all on a 4gb sdhc it boots to a command prompt   

grub>

Should it go further and otherwise, what should i type at the prompt?

Do you mean your new EeePC Linux on USB boots to the grub> shell mode or the Asus EeePC Recovery USB disk boot to this?

Linux on USB (sdhc card) boots to grub>

In any case, this would mean the boot loader has failed somehow. Probably installation was not completed. May be there was errors copying the files. Try to do it all over again. If you have an external card reader, better do it with your SDHC in the external card reader. The internal one is not so reliable copying large amount of data.

Okay. I did it on the internal sd card reader so I'll try it again on an external and report back. Thanks