Trouble with mylivecd, MiniMe and bfs kernel combination

[utu]

Greetings.

I tried mylivecd twice with MiniMe KDE 11.07 and bfs kernel for 2cpu i686.

Used K3B to burn iso. All appearances during process, both times, seemed ok,
but resultant 'livecds' do not boot. First was about 650 Mb on a cd; second ,
about 850 Mb on a dvd. Coming from a LiveUSB on 4 Gb SanDisk that seems
well behaved otherwise.

Where do I start to unravel this?

[kjpetrie]

What do you mean by "doesn't boot". Does it start to boot and fail part way through, or does it not give you a grub screen at all?

More details, please.

[utu]

I get a 'thermometer' screen like a normal boot,
blue line takes forever to go clear across.
Never  get any other info.

Interrupting this with keyboard entries shows
a black screen with lots of text which looks like
error messages, but so out of synch it is not
readable.

I expect the text may say something like
'...some file not readable...' or '...can't access...'
It's too shaky to read clearly.

DVD has three files on it: boot, livecd.sqfs & isolinux:
boot contains an empty grub folder and nothing else;
isolinux contains 52 files, totalling 13 Mb;
livecd.sqfs is an 807 Mb single file.

[kjpetrie]

OK, so it does start to boot. That means you have burnt the CD/DVD correctly, though it's still possible they contain errors. Is there a Media Check entry in the boot loader screen? Does it pass?

Still on the boot loader screen, if you press F3 you should see the actual kernel options line come up. It should have an entry "vga=xxx" where xxx is a three figure code. Check it against this table http://pierre.baudu.in/other/grub.vga.modes.html to see whether it matches the resolution of your screen. If not change it and boot and press Esc to see the output. Hopefully it will now be readable and you'll be able to report where it stops and any error messages. You can go back quite a way through these by pressing Shift+PageUp.

Hope this helps a bit more.

[menotu]

Another thing you could consider trying would be to run the mylivecd iso you created in Virtualbox and that way you can discount the ISO itself.

[utu]

@ menotu

The iso boots up in VMWare-player, but it's the original, unmodified iso.
None of my cute stuff is there. Virtually no progress, one might say.

I suspect I can't get away with just using the 4 Gb USB.  I'd hoped that I could.
I'm not clear on the math, so that may be the problem.

Dumping about 175 Mb in ATI & NVIDIA drivers did not appear to change the situation
in regard to the amount of space in 'df', FWIW.

I do note that there was never a warning (from the software) that any prerequisite
storage was  missing.  If that is the problem, seems like there should have been such a
message.

@ kjpetrie

I did not do a check on the new iso.  I presumed it was not right given
there was nothing in the boot folder.  I'd hoped the sqfs material was salvageable.
I did verify that the iso I burned checked against the one I just produced with mylivecd.

Thanks to both for your suggestions.
The PCLinuxOS mylivecd approach looks like it will solve the remastering process for
me, but I'll have to (reluctantly) find the resources for it to do its thing.

[Old-Polack]

utu:

The /boot/grub directory is always empty by default. Should you choose to use grub to boot the liveUSB you can copy all the files from your installed /boot/grub directory into that empty one, adjust the boot stanzas in the copied menu.lst to use the files in the isolinux directory, then install grub to the MBR of the USB device. In my case I use a partition on the hard drive rather than a USB stick, because the hard drive itself is in a USB case thus as portable as a USB stick but 1 TB in size. Still, the principal is the same, as are the stanzas used to boot the various OS.

Having multiple boot options, I have the isolinux directory inside of a directory named for the OS to be booted, so to boot the live minime, I have this stanza;

title minime live
root (hd0,12)
kernel /minime/isolinux/vmlinuz livecd=minime initrd=initrd.gz fromusb root=/dev/rd/3 acpi=on vga=791 splash=verbose fstab=rw,auto,noatime
initrd /minime/isolinux/initrd.gz

To boot the live Gnome version I have this stanza which is similar but looks for the kernel and initrd in /gnome/isolinux.

title Gnome Live
root (hd0,12)
kernel /gnome/isolinux/vmlinuz livecd=gnome-07 initrd=initrd.gz fromusb root=/dev/sda13 acpi=on vga=791 splash=verbose fstab=rw,auto,noatime
initrd /gnome/isolinux/initrd.gz

Note also that with multiple OS present, the livecd.sqfs file for each Os is renamed to give each a unique name representing the appropriate OS.

[polack@fatman share1]$ ls |grep sqfs |sort
gnome-07.sqfs
jphoenix4.sqfs
kde2010.sqfs
kdefinal.sqfs
minime.sqfs
ob-mini.sqfs
phoenix07.sqfs
test2-kde.sqfs
test3-kde.sqfs

[utu]

@ old-polack

I wonder what format(s) you use on the many partitions of your 1Tb drive?

I know we're asked to format the USBs as ext2 or ext3.
I know of some storing linux stuff on ntsf.

I'll probaby end up shrinking my 400 Gb external USB that I've been storing Win7 snapshots on, but I'd like to do right on formatting a partition for sqfs and linux operations in general.

Thanks for your comments.

[Old-Polack]

@ old-polack

I wonder what format(s) you use on the many partitions of your 1Tb drive?

I know we're asked to format the USBs as ext2 or ext3.
I know of some storing linux stuff on ntsf.

I'll probaby end up shrinking my 400 Gb external USB that I've been storing Win7 snapshots on, but I'd like to do right on formatting a partition for sqfs and linux operations in general.

Thanks for your comments.

That particular partition is formatted ext3. I did that because others reported problems with ext4 and live OS operations, although I had not personally observed problems with ext4 previously. Originally these were on an internal hard drive on my backup unit, and I copied the images that were there to the USB hard drives partition with rsync.

The rest of the partitions on that drive are either ext3 or ext4. I don't have any Windows installations so also don't have any NTFS partitions.

My master grub, that boots my full installations on the USB hard drive, has a chainload stanza in its menu.lst to reach the grub that is installed on the partition itself, which uses the menu.lst from that partitions /boot/grub directory. If you don't have any fully installed OS on the external hard drive you can make the grub on the partition holding the live OS files the master grub.

[utu]

@ Old-Polack

Thanks for your comments.  I thought perhaps ext3 was the answer.
I'll see if I can adapt this somehow to my situation.

@ kjpetrie

Used F3 to peek at what's behind the boot splash screen(?) and found ten seconds
of black screen preceding the onset of the previously described randomly scrolling
nonsense.  I don't have to wait so long to see it now, but I can't make it intelligible.

I conclude, tentatively, that I need to provide more space for the operation.  There
is only 1.7 Gb unused, according to some of the 'df' suggestions.  I can get my four
folders (boot, changes, KDE_0 & KDE_0.sqfs) down to 447 Mb.  I don't know what
math to apply to account for re-mastering, but I suspect it's more than 1.7 Gb.

Thanks for your comments, as well.