Persistence Question - How is my ethernet still working ?

[MTCAT]

Hi Rich,

I did check to see if my USB drive shows in the BIOS, it does under the "USB Drives Enabled", just says "1 Drive".

I also tried changing my boot priority 1 from "USB", to "Removable Device", didn't do anything unfortunately.

I also tried hitting F11 on power up, unfortunately I do not get a Boot menu of any kind, it just goes right into Lubuntu off the CF-card.

Thanks,

David

[MTCAT]

Hi Rich,

For the heck of it, I tried to make a boot-stick with Rufus, I thought for sure that would work, it did not, still just booted into Lubuntu, the plot thickens, maybe I'll try a different USB stick, the one I'm trying is an old 1 GByte stick....

[MTCAT]

Hi Rich,

Holy moly, it was the bloody pen drive ! !, feels like two days wasted on an old 1Gbyte stick (now in the garbage), I followed your instructions with a new 16 GByte stick, and voila, TinyCore 3.8.4 boots up now no problem ! !

Sorry for all the hassle, should have just started with a new pen drive, wow.

I'll try and run the TCscan.sh now, I think you wanted me to do that still.

Thanks for your patience.

David

[Rich]

Hi MTCAT
Good, I was about to recommend that you get in touch with WinSystems support staff:
https://www.winsystems.com/support/

And ask them:
Which BIOS settings effect whether a thumb drive will be recognized as a bootable device ?
Which "hot key" is used to call up the boot menu ?

You might still want to ask them the second question, and why they didn't document it.

[MTCAT]

Hi Rich,

Here's the results of TCscan.sh on the "new" install of TinyCore3.8.4, as you instructed, I did a b/u to the pen drive (sdb1) before running TCscan.sh, hopefully everything is normal now.

Thanks,

David

[MTCAT]

Hi Rich,

One catch regarding the latest TCscan.sh, I forgot to mount my 128 GByte CF-card before running TCscan.sh, hope that's alright.

Thanks, I will e-mail WinSystems about the BIOS "hot-key" hopefully they will know which key is supposed to be used for that.

Thanks,

David

[Rich]

Hi MTCAT

One catch regarding the latest TCscan.sh, I forgot to mount my 128 GByte CF-card before running TCscan.sh, hope that's alright. ...

Yes, that's OK.

First lets install some extensions:

Code: [Select]

tce-load -wi compiletc perl5 bash ncursesw-dev bc-1.06.94 glibc_apps elfutils-dev
Now lets create persistent /home and /opt directories. Open your  extlinux.conf  file:

Code: [Select]

sudo editor /mnt/sdb1/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf &
Change this:

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APPEND initrd=/boot/tinycore.gz quiet  waitusb=5 waitusb=5:UUID="18753acd-09c4-4d53-a924-9e7251dd57e7" tce=UUID="18753acd-09c4-4d53-a924-9e7251dd57e7"
To this:

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APPEND initrd=/boot/tinycore.gz quiet waitusb=10:UUID="18753acd-09c4-4d53-a924-9e7251dd57e7" tce=UUID="18753acd-09c4-4d53-a924-9e7251dd57e7" home=UUID="18753acd-09c4-4d53-a924-9e7251dd57e7" opt=UUID="18753acd-09c4-4d53-a924-9e7251dd57e7"
Then  File->Save.  Then click the  Exit  icon, select  Reboot, and OK.

When the system comes back up, run another scan for me.

[MTCAT]

Thanks Rich, I'll try that later today, work as usual is in the way of my play-time ! I was happy to see already though that I was able to install pciutils.tcz,  powered-down  and then powered back up, and lspci still worked, awesome !, so that was nice, I do see a weird pci related error though during bootup of TC3.8.4, something about memory locations and a pci bridge...hopefully it's not related to my ADC card.

Thanks,

David

[MTCAT]

Hi Rich,

Sorry for the delay, here's the output of ./TCscan.sh !

One thing, the UUID number in your post was different than what I saw in extlinux.conf so I just used the same UUID that was in my .conf file (copy and paste) for the home=UUID=..... and the opt=UUID=.... lines, hopefully that was the right thing to do ?

Thanks,

David

[Rich]

Hi MTCAT

... I just used the same UUID that was in my .conf file (copy and paste) for the home=UUID=..... and the opt=UUID=....

Perfect. One more step. Now that you have persistent /home and /opt directories, there is no longer any reason to
run backups on them. I seem to remember older versions of Tinycore would balk if there was nothing listed in the
/opt/.filetool.lst  file. So do this:

Code: [Select]

sudo touch /tmp/dummy

Code: [Select]

sudo echo "tmp/dummy" > /opt/.filetool.lst
 * This will backup/restore an empty file which will be very quick.
 * This will allow you to still add files to be backed up if needed.


Then click the  Exit  icon, select  Reboot, and OK.

That last scan looks good.

    [EDIT]:  Added 2 sentences marked by asterisks.  Rich

[MTCAT]

Hi Rich,

Awesome, very exciting to finally have a proper install of TinyCore !, thanks so much for all the help....very nicely, I now retain all the packages that were installed (pciutils, coreutils, gcc, linux-headers, etc.), but, the built and installed ADC driver was lost on power-down.

In order to not have to build and install the ADC driver on every power-up, could I also make my /usr directory persistent by simply adding a "usr=UUD=...." line as well to extlinux.conf ?

Or I guess I could make my own "package" which could get auto installed at boot time ?

Thanks,

David

[Rich]

Hi MTCAT

...  could I also make my /usr directory persistent by simply adding a "usr=UUD=...." line as well to extlinux.conf ? ...

No.  usr=  is not a valid option and not meant to be persistent:

... At the reboot mtpaint is not on the pc, I have to do the tcz extension? ...

All files and links to files in  /bin, /dev, /etc, /lib, /sbin, /tmp, /usr, /var  are in RAM and get recreated every time you boot.
The contents for those directories come from the  initrd (core.gz)  and  .tcz  extensions. So if you want it to persist, you
need to create an extension. ...

... Or I guess I could make my own "package" which could get auto installed at boot time ?

That would be the way to go.

[MTCAT]

Thanks Rich, I'll continue reading up on making my own extension then, thanks a lot for all the help.

Cheers,

David

[Rich]

Hi MTCAT
Then read this:
http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,24795.msg157885.html#msg157885