Acess qemu virtual drive when booting from USB

Forum: DSL Embedded
Topic: Acess qemu virtual drive when booting from USB
started by: Tangled_Kid

Posted by Tangled_Kid on Mar. 29 2007,21:02

Hi there,

I started off using DSL under QEMU & Windows & all works fine with a qemu virtual disk, but is there any way of making this disk available when booting direct from the USB drive?

Still new to Linux, so please don't assume any knowledge when replying.

Thanks,

T

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Mar. 29 2007,23:21

I think you can achieve this by booting with the 'qemu' cheatcode

Posted by Tangled_Kid on Mar. 30 2007,01:11

I tried that but it doesn't seem to work. I get a whole load of errors when & try & boot about sread failing? If I use dsl toram I can at least get to xwindows, but with no restore from my qemu backups.

Any ideas what this error means?

(and is there any way of viewing these errors in a log file, as they fly off the screen so fast I can't read any bar the last few?)

T

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Mar. 31 2007,22:49

I think the qemu bootcode previously worked with the 'built-in' harddisk in dsl-embedded.zip (originally in .../qemu/harddisk)

Perhaps you could use syslogd - but I'm not sure if those errors will be in there or not.
You could read it on the screen by pressing scroll lock to pause the screen, then use pgup pgdown to navigate.

Posted by roberts on April 01 2007,06:32

This capability is explained in the readme.txt file.

To access and share your Qemu virtual drive you need to boot natively with the following:

boot: dsl qemu frugal restore=harddisk mydsl=harddisk/mydsl

Once you have your virtual qemu drive correctly setup and shared then just add:

frugal qemu restore=harddisk mydsl=harddisk/mydsl

to the append section of /cdrom/syslinux.cfg

Then you will have a seamlessly shared virtual drive whether booting via dsl-vhd.bat in Qemu or natively from the usb pendrive.

Posted by Tangled_Kid on April 01 2007,11:09

Thanks for the advice, however it's still not working.

I get the following errors during boot...

bread in fat_access failed
I/O error: dev 08:01, sector 14
(a lot of times)

bash: /bin/su: Input/output error
(followed by several lines saying...)
cloop: error -3 uncompressing block 95 65536/0/30468/0 1690555-1721023

Also, if I don't use the 'toram' options, the errors seem to continue ad infinitum. If I do use the 'toram' option, I get all the errors, but it does finally boot into XWindows, however my settings are not available, & the backup process fails as it says that the file system is read only (as it's mounted as /cdrom/.

Any advice greatly welcomed. I hope it's not just that my memory stick is not compatible.

Thanks,

T

Posted by roberts on April 01 2007,15:18

If you are experiencing i/o errors upon initial USB boot, then that is not the virtual hard drive but a likely bad installation or possibly a failing pendrive. Try to booting USB natively with the options of:

boot: dsl base norestore

These options will ignore the virtual drive, or any other autoscan of backup and extensions.