Boot Kurobox Pro from USB drive
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Boot From USB
The following instructions will allow you to boot from an external usb drive.[1] You will lose the mtd3(samba) partition on the internal nand flash, but I assume you will not need this storage once you are running off of an external drive. This guide assumes you are already comfortable using uboot and that you have already read the instructions for the conventional way to manually install Armel Debian on an internal SATA drive [2]
Prepare Your Drive
Just follow the instructions provided for the manual installation of Armel Debian. It will not make any difference that you are using a usb drive, it should still show up as /dev/sda. You need to partition your drive, create the file systems, and create the armel-lenny root file system.
Prepare the Kernel
Assuming your external drive is on /dev/sda do the following to load the kernel into nand flash. This will erase anything stored in your samba directory.
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 flash_eraseall -j /dev/mtdchar3 nandwrite -p /dev/mtdchar3 /mnt/sda1/uImage
Prepare uboot
Get into uboot and enter the following.
setenv default_kernel_addr 0x00100000 setenv bootargs_base console=ttyS0,115200 setenv bootargs_root 'root=/dev/sda2 rw; rootdelay=10' setenv bootargs $(bootargs_base) $(bootargs_root) $(buffalo_ver) setenv uImage_block 0 setenv uImage_offset 0x04400000 setenv bootcmd 'nboot $(default_kernel_addr) $(uImage_block) $(uImage_offset); bootm $(default_kernel_addr)' saveenv boot
Thats it. You should now be able to boot into Debian Linux and the root will be on your external usb drive.
How to Go Back
Uboot settings
If you decide that you want to go back to the way it was and not boot from an external drive just do the following. In uboot:
setenv default_kernel_addr 0x00100000 setenv bootargs_base console=ttyS0,115200 setenv bootargs_root root=/dev/mtdblock2 rw setenv bootargs $(bootargs_base) $(bootargs_root) $(buffalo_ver) setenv uImage_block 0 setenv uImage_offset 0x00020000 setenv bootcmd 'nboot $(default_kernel_addr) $(uImage_block) $(uImage_offset); bootm $(default_kernel_addr)' saveenv boot
Flash
Then to get back the /dev/mtd3 partition the way it was:
flash_eraseall -j /dev/mtdchar3 mkfs.jffs2 /dev/mtdchar3
Note: you may have to install mkfs.jffs2 as it appears to not be installed by default.
