This is a continuation of a discussion started here. Instructions were also posted to the KnoppMyth Wiki.

I had the chance to try this method out on a spare hard drive this evening. Although I was able to install KM using the instructions provided on the wiki, there were some issues.

First, let me say I was trying to install to a frontend only machine. No tuner cards were installed. I did not test MythTV functionality, only the install process. Here's what I found:

I plugged in the USB drive and powerd on the machine. In my motherboard's BIOS (Abit AN-M2HD) I selected USB-ZIP/LS as my boot device (my other options were USB-FDD or USB-CDROM. USB-FDD failed, did not test USB-CDROM).

KnoppMyth installer boot prompt came up (quite fast, I might add). At the boot prompt I entered

Things seemed to carry on normally until it tried to test the cd files. The files to check were not found because the test program was looking for them under boot/isolinux, but we had changed that to boot/syslinux earlier.

The install seemed to go normally. A bit faster than the CD-ROM-based install, but I was not timing it, so that was merely my perception.

Before the 1st reboot and "ejection" of the CD, quite a few errors broke through the blue screen, but they were much too fast for me to catch any of it. I selected OK to reboot.

After the 1st reboot the liloboot menu appeared (to my surprise) with a 15 second timeout. the choices were:

Linux
Win/DOS(sdb1)
PowerOff

I let it timeout and it booted Linux as expected.

As it continued to boot there were some problems:


I plugged another usb stick into the computer and nothing happened to confirm there was a problem.


On to configuration...

was repeated 3 or 4 times. I think this is specific to my hardware, not the USB stick install, but I thought I'd mention it.

My StreamZap was not detected by the lirc scripts due to the usb issues I mentioned.

Everything else seemed to be fine. We'll need a lot more testing on this. If you have time, please post your experiences and please detail any fixes or changes you made to get something to work.

_________________
Mike
My Hardware Profile

Yeah, these are the same issues that came up with the "drunk monkey" instructions for doing this that I was working on last weekend and published privately. I should probably make them available despite the known issues as they're more detailed than the ones that alien posted. Since I don't have time to reformat them for the wiki right now I'll repost them here. My ultimate goal was to reduce these to a completely automated script, that you would feed the location of the ISO and the device name, and have it do all the work. (OBTW - The boot and install from a USB stick _is_ substantially faster as you noted.)

Please note that these instructions show the same issues described above.

=====================================================

I had to do parts of this on my Fedora WS for some reason. The KM box didn't seem to produce a working USB image. It would boot to point, but then it dropped me to a limited shell. I'm still trying to sort out the details. Possibly failure to sync the first couple attempts or different versions of some utility... I've also still got an issue with the checksums. The files on the key are OK, but despite my tweaking it doesn't seem to find all of them...

0) Make sure you have mtools installed. All the usual apt-get safety caveats apply. Be ready to say NO if it wants to replace a bunch of stuff or drag along dependencies.

1) Insert the USB drive and determine it's device name.

2) Set these variables appropriately

3) Format the USB drive

When you're done the partiton table should look something like this:

4) Create a modified version of the KM ISO image

5) Copy that onto the USB drive and finalize the setup

6) Boot with it. You usually need to add USB HDD to your BIOS boot list.

I've tried this on two different ISOs now and neither worked.

Both seemed to install fine, but after selecting the remote during the setup questions, it would lock the computer when starting lircd. I tried by-passing this step, but it would also lockup somewhere later.

Since this happened both times the same way and it happened during the config after the install (which went smoothly), I suspect it is a problem with the moved files. testcd showed no errors. Installing from the CD worked fine.

I moved /boot/isolinux to /boot/syslinux. Both isolinux and syslinux will work from /boot. I suspect it might help things if the original iso had everything in /boot instead of /boot/isolinux. Then there would be no need to move files around.

_________________
ASUS AT3N7A-I (Atom 330)
TBS 8922 PCI (DVB-S2)