Difficulties with CorePlus installation to a pendrive

[gerald_clark]

Read the book http://tinycorelinux.net/book.html
It explains the backup options.

[Mike7]

Hi, Juanito.

You need to shut down and reboot without a backup so that a clean, known state is reached.

What will get lost if I do that? Will I lose my configurations and my documents?

Note that you can also achieve this by entering "norestore" at the boot prompt.

I don't think there is a no restore choice on the screen I get when I boot. It just has choices about copying the OS to RAM, and such. But there is a backup choice when I shutdown: None, Safe, and Backup. Should I choose None?

Mike

[Juanito]

If you have not saved your documents to permanent storage they will be lost. As a safety measure, you could copy the mydata* files to permanent storage and delete them from their current location.

For the purposes of getting things sorted out, it would be better to choose the backup choice "none".

[Rich]

Hi Mike7

- New mydata.gz file in /mnt/sdb1/tce/
- New mydata.gz file in /etc/sysconfig/tcedir/

Those are both physically the same file.  /etc/sysconfig/tcedir/  is a link to  /mnt/sdb1/tce/

- An empty directory /mnt/sdb1/tce/tce/
- An empty directory /etc/sysconfig/tcedir/tce/

Those are both the same directory.

[Mike7]

Hi, Rich.

Thanks. I  thought that /etc/sysconfig/tcedir/ was probably a reflection of tce/ in /mnt/sdb1/, but I wasn't sure.

But should the tce/ directory in /mnt/sdb1/tce/ be empty, or be there at all? In other words, what the heck is an empty /mnt/sdb1/tce/tce/ directory doing there?

M.

[gerald_clark]

It will be empty if you have not installed any extensions, nor done a backup.

[Mike7]

Hi, juanito.

If you have not saved your documents to permanent storage they will be lost.

I've been saving them to a folder I created in the tce directory. Perhaps I shouldn't do that, but it works. (Maybe it messes up some config files, but so far everything seems okay.)

As a safety measure, you could copy the mydata* files to permanent storage and delete them from their current location.

I can see saving a copy to another disk outside core as a safe backup, but why would I want to delete them from core?

For the purposes of getting things sorted out, it would be better to choose the backup choice "none".

You may be right about that, but I just went with whatever the shutdown dialogue gave me as a default. I figured it knew best. Now what can I do? I've already done one "Safe" backup and one "Backup" backup. <grin>

This is becoming like a Chinese puzzle.

For the purposes of clarity, I suppose I could, as you say, delete the mydata.gz file again and shut down with "None" in the shutdown dialogue. I just don't really want to lose the extensions I've downloaded.

The alternative is re-installing from scratch. But it seems like giving up.

Mike

[Mike7]

Hi, Gerald.

It will be empty if you have not installed any extensions, nor done a backup.

Ah, but you see I have done both those things. 

I may be all wrong, but I suspect that this /mnt/sdb1/tce/tce/ directory shouldn't be there at all and that it's just the result of having put tce=sdb1 into the Installer when the Installer creates the tce directory automatically anyway.

I don't know what my personal solution to this is, but to keep it from happening to anyone else how about removing tce =xxx from the list of boot code options in the Installer?

M.

[gerald_clark]

Post the output of "showbootcodes".

[Mike7]

Post the output of "showbootcodes".

That's tricky, because I would have to switch to TCL to get them, and then switch back to Puppy to post them. (I have to use Puppy Linux to communicate with the forum because I don't yet have a web browser in TCL.)

But since I haven't changed any boot codes (not intentionally, anyhow), they should still be the same as when I edited extlinux.conf (see Feb. 15th posts):

Code: [Select]

tc@box:~$ showbootcodes
initrd=/tce/boot/core.gz loglevel=3 waitusb=10:UUID="6065ad4c-d216-48bb-a7c1-c538c02a42ed" tce=UUID="6065ad4c-d216-48bb-a7c1-c538c02a42ed" BOOT_IMAGE=/tce/boot/vmlinuz
Those are the boot codes that juanito and coreplayer2 advised me to put into extlinux.conf.

Note that tce=sdb1 was removed, yet there is a suspicious-looking empty directory /mnt/sdb1/tce/tce/ that /etc/sysconfig/tcedir/tce/ has created.

M.

[Juanito]

I can see saving a copy to another disk outside core as a safe backup, but why would I want to delete them from core?

Because, due to the fact you had both a back-up and persistent home and opt set, the backup is probably messed up.

For the purposes of clarity, I suppose I could, as you say, delete the mydata.gz file again and shut down with "None" in the shutdown dialogue. I just don't really want to lose the extensions I've downloaded.

Extensions should be on persistent storage and not in your backup

[Mike7]

Curaga-

I directed two posts (#s 37 & 39 above) to Gerald Clark that I think maybe should have been addressed to you as well.

As you can see from this series of posts, adding tce=xxx to the boot codes in the Installer app is not only redundant (we all agree about that, right?) but seems to have messed up part of the filesystem, creating a weird empty /mnt/sdb1/tce/tce/ directory, if nothing worse. (Or am I wrong and /mnt/sdb1/tce/tce/ really is supposed to be there?)

Since you were reasonable enough to add an explanatory label to that page of the Installer, how about also removing tce=xxx from the list of possible add-in boot codes  so that no one makes the same mistake I did?

Cheers!

Mike

[gerald_clark]

No, it is not redundant.  The tce directory can be on a drive other than the boot drive, or on a different partition.

[coreplayer2]

In any case, I slugged in a few of the boot codes (like tce=sdb1, home=sdb1, and restore=sdb1) without knowing what I was doing, just for the heck of it.

You know, perhaps we could have avoided a lot of problems by letting the installer use it's defaults?   I think I said before, I'd start over

[Mike7]

Gerald-

No, it is not redundant.  The tce directory can be on a drive other than the boot drive, or on a different partition.

But the Installer automatically puts tce=UUID=xxx into extlinux.conf, doesn't it? Does adding a tce=yyy boot code override the xxx UUID?  If so, how do you explain that the Installer created a tce directory inside the tce directory (/mnt/sdb1/tce/tce/)?

M.