I'm trying to set up my NSLU2 with an 8GB USB drive as the main disk.
I've been following http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/install.html
however I have an issue.

To prevent having the nslu2 perform the partitioning I've done this on
my laptop using a live cd (fdisk, swapon, mke2fs, etc). When the
debian installer gets to do the partition it sees the 8Gb drive as a
fat32 drive with no partitions so I cannot tell the installer to use
it.

Can anyone help point me in the right direction? I'm a little lost.
Thanks in advance
Dave

On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:34:10 -0700, dave.dex wrote:

> I'm trying to set up my NSLU2 with an 8GB USB drive as the main disk.
> I've been following http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/install.html
> however I have an issue.
>
> To prevent having the nslu2 perform the partitioning I've done this on
> my laptop using a live cd (fdisk, swapon, mke2fs, etc). When the debian
> installer gets to do the partition it sees the 8Gb drive as a fat32
> drive with no partitions so I cannot tell the installer to use it.
>
> Can anyone help point me in the right direction? I'm a little lost.
> Thanks in advance
> Dave

Without knowing exactly what you did to partition the USB drive--you
didn't elaborate--I can only guess: It looks like when you used fdisk to
do the partitioning, you didn't save the changes; that is, you hit "q" to
quit, which doesn't save any changes, instead of "w" which writes the
changes to the drive, then quits. Also, when you create a partition in
fdisk you also need to set the partition "type": 83 is Linux, and 82 is
Linux swap, IIRC.

Stef

On 2008-04-15, dave.dex@googlemail.com <dave.dex@googlemail.com> wrote:

> I'm trying to set up my NSLU2 with an 8GB USB drive as the main disk.
> I've been following http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/install.html
> however I have an issue.
>
> To prevent having the nslu2 perform the partitioning I've done this on
> my laptop using a live cd (fdisk, swapon, mke2fs, etc). When the
> debian installer gets to do the partition it sees the 8Gb drive as a
> fat32 drive with no partitions so I cannot tell the installer to use
> it.
>
> Can anyone help point me in the right direction? I'm a little lost.

What does "fdisk -l /dev/[whatever]" tell you about the drive? If
there's no data on the drive, you can start fresh by writting a new,
empty partition table (use the "o" command from inside fdisk) and
creating the partitions you need there.

--

John (john@os2.dhs.org)

On Apr 16, 3:44 am, John Thompson <j...@vector.os2.dhs.org> wrote:
> On 2008-04-15, dave....@googlemail.com <dave....@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> > I'm trying to set up my NSLU2 with an 8GB USB drive as the main disk.
> > I've been followinghttp://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/install.html
> > however I have an issue.
>
> > To prevent having the nslu2 perform the partitioning I've done this on
> > my laptop using a live cd (fdisk, swapon, mke2fs, etc). When the
> > debian installer gets to do the partition it sees the 8Gb drive as a
> > fat32 drive with no partitions so I cannot tell the installer to use
> > it.
>
> > Can anyone help point me in the right direction? I'm a little lost.
>
> What does "fdisk -l /dev/[whatever]" tell you about the drive? If
> there's no data on the drive, you can start fresh by writting a new,
> empty partition table (use the "o" command from inside fdisk) and
> creating the partitions you need there.
>
> --
>
> John (j...@os2.dhs.org)

Thanks for the help. I did make sure I wrote the partitions and when I
re-insert the drive into another linux box it appears to be correctly
mount the partitions as I've made them. If I list the partitions using
fdisk it displays them correctly. I'll post the exact output in a
moment.