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Author Topic: Accessing other partitions on USB storage provisioned with 'dd if=iso ...'  (Read 1707 times)

Offline player1

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Hello :D

My understanding of how tiny core works is that it tries to mount available partitions with comprehensible filesystems, and looks for a specific directory structure in the root of the filesystem(s) when deciding how to proceed to boot/configure itself.

Unfortunately, when booting as an iso, the whole disk is mounted as 'what to load from' when construction ramfs/whatever root filesystem. Once everything is loaded, that physical disk (my thumbdrive in this instance) remains mounted, and prevents any other partitions of that disk from being mounted until I manually unmount it, as root.

The undesirable side effect this leads to is not being able to do things like have onboot packages actually load on boot. What, as someone booting from USB, should I do so that the entire disk doesn't get eaten by the mounting of the isofs at the beginning of the disk? Its kind of an interesting situation because linux still allows the specification and reading of partitions as if the iso FS is just a partition itself (which it kind of isn't).

Maybe I should be chainloading the iso or something? Just looking for the simplest solution. Generating grub images for uefi chainloading is kind of a PITA, and generic solutions that used to work no longer seem to work for uefi CSM.

I read something in the forums about using special software to set magical bits that tell my firmware 'what sort' of device the thumbdrive is (removable mass storage, hard drive, floppy drive, etc), but I would like to avoid twiddling magical bits if at all possible. I don't want to break this relatively expensive thumb drive.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Offline curaga

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It would be easiest to install to the usb stick, instead of writing an ISO, and then adding partitions to the hybrid mbr.
The only barriers that can stop you are the ones you create yourself.

Offline polikuo

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If you're making a UEFI/Legacy dual boot USB stick, see
GRUB2
SYSLINUX