# Laptop Install w/ USB or Firewire CD?

## al3x

I'm about to get a laptop for school this fall, and since I don't use a CD drive very often I was thinking about getting a model that comes only with an external drive, like the Sony VX series.  However, I've seen conflicting reports on installing from an external CD drive.  Any of you Gentooers have experience with installing from a USB or Firewire drive?  Thanks a bunch!

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## reverius42

 *al3x wrote:*   

> I'm about to get a laptop for school this fall, and since I don't use a CD drive very often I was thinking about getting a model that comes only with an external drive, like the Sony VX series.  However, I've seen conflicting reports on installing from an external CD drive.  Any of you Gentooers have experience with installing from a USB or Firewire drive?  Thanks a bunch!

 

I have an external PCMCIA cd-rom drive with my Sony Vaio SR33... and installing Gentoo is only slightly more painful than, say, RedHat.

First, boot from the CD-ROM (hopefully you can do that!)... at which point, it can no longer read the CD-ROM. Because it doesn't know how. Not a problem  :Smile: 

Load the modules for whatever network interface you've got (be it pcmcia, built-in, or whatever) and set up the connection as described in the gentoo documentation.

fdisk your hard drive, and set up the partitions as normal, except make another partition that's about 100 megs (it can be bigger or smaller, as long as it fits what you need).

run "mkfs.ext2" on that partition (or whatever fs you want to use, I recommend ext2) and then mount it to /mnt/cdrom (yeah, I know it's not a cd-rom, but it's consistent with the Gentoo docs).

Then, using "wget", download whatever Gentoo tarballs you need to /mnt/cdrom... for instance:

```
[root@localhost /mnt/cdrom]# wget http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo/releases/build/1.3b_test/stage1-ix86-1.3b-r1.tbz2
```

to get a Stage 1 tarball of Gentoo 1.3b.

Once that's done, just follow the installation instructions and pretend that /mnt/cdrom is an actual cdrom. That's all you need for gentoo (because it doesn't really use the cd-rom anyway).

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## al3x

Wow, I really appreciate you documenting that, especially after nobody had any thoughts since May!  I hate to say it, but I ended up getting a Fujitsu S Series with an integrated DVD/CDRW, so at least that part of the install isn't gonna be a problem!  Thanks a bunch tho!  :Very Happy: 

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## reverius42

 *al3x wrote:*   

> Wow, I really appreciate you documenting that, especially after nobody had any thoughts since May!  I hate to say it, but I ended up getting a Fujitsu S Series with an integrated DVD/CDRW, so at least that part of the install isn't gonna be a problem!  Thanks a bunch tho! 

 

You're quite welcome. Hopefully some other people who need to see this procedure happen upon it (because I imagine it's pretty much hidden here)... I think a lot of people would benefit from it. It took me the better part of a week to figure out how to do this flawlessly  :Smile: 

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## Ryan Bloom

This is great.  I had to install on a Fujitsu B series a few months ago, and I ended up using TFTP to do it.  Now, I just got a Sony SRX99, and it can't find the CDROM on boot.  I was about to give up and install another distro.  Now, I don't have to!

Thanks,

Ryan

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## n0de

Let me know how the Sony srx99 turns out. I have one too and have been debating on whether or not to try installing Gentoo.

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## ruronikenshin83

absolutely awesome.  i have an SR33 that i've been dying to try linux out on, but every distro i've tried to boot on it (including Knoppix) eventually dies and refuses to recognize my cd-rom.

i'm gonna give this a try in a few days.  thanks a bunch.

oh, btw, reverius, do you have a problem with your sr33 getting extremely hot sometimes?  i'm pretty sure my fan's still working, cuz i can hear the humming most of the time and feel the air under the fan, but it still gets abnormally hot sometimes.

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## reverius42

 *ruronikenshin83 wrote:*   

> absolutely awesome.  i have an SR33 that i've been dying to try linux out on, but every distro i've tried to boot on it (including Knoppix) eventually dies and refuses to recognize my cd-rom.
> 
> i'm gonna give this a try in a few days.  thanks a bunch.
> 
> oh, btw, reverius, do you have a problem with your sr33 getting extremely hot sometimes?  i'm pretty sure my fan's still working, cuz i can hear the humming most of the time and feel the air under the fan, but it still gets abnormally hot sometimes.

 

Well, here's the thing... I'm not sure if the instructions I gave still work... and I think they don't, actually. Gentoo has changed quite a bit since the version I wrote these for (maybe 1.1-ish). I gave up installing it on my laptop last time I tried, and I am using it on my desktop now.   :Razz: 

And yes, I my SR33 does get incredibly hot. I figure it's designed that way. Or maybe a flawed design... either way, it's probably too hot to be a "lap" top.

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## ruronikenshin83

damn. and i was looking forward to wiping all traces of Win2K off my laptop.  i'll still give it a shot and if it works or i miraculously find a way for it to work, i'll post it on here.

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## wolfmann

I have a vx89 and its a pain to install linux on (basically you can't get any linux dist to boot the install cd's -- you have to do a PXE boot install (see www.differentpla.net for a debian install, if you mix this with the gentoo alternate install it kinda works... I get a hang on "Caching service deps" on my first boot with stage1-1.4-rc4  :Sad: 

oh and with the gentoo installer cd, even with options "acpi doscsi dofirewire" it won't be able to find the cdrom -- it loads the right modules, but there aren't any devices in /dev corresponding to my CD-rom so it stops in linuxrc.

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## ruronikenshin83

MWAHAHAHAHA

I got it to work for the SR33!!

You need to pass the following command

```
gentoo ide2=0x180,0x386
```

along with any other things you need, dopcmcia, etc, when you boot the Gentoo CD...

Props to http://www.shallowsky.com/vaiolinux.html#whichdistro for giving me the correct command to pass to the booter...

^_^

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## gerzy

I thought I'd pass on a tip I picked up to this thread since I'm currently installing Gentoo on an SRX87.

I was having the same CD detection issue with a firewire CDROM and couldn't figure out any boot options to get it to work.  Since I couldn't get the gentoo root filesystem on the 1.4 CD mounted, I couldn't even bring up the network to grab a stageX tarball and proceed manually.

However the gentoo 1.2 CD (gentoo-ix86-1.2.iso) worked since it does not mount a root image on CD and enough tools were available for me to get on the network and pull down a stageX tarball.   You can even follow the 1.4 docs (when you get to step 8, follow the instructions for downloading a tarball not on the CD).

I picked this up here: http://vorlon.ces.cwru.edu/~ames/r505gl/

Maybe it'll help some folks.

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## Linki

For those who having problems with Gentoo 1.4 and a USB or Firewire CD-ROM when prober booting fails.

If got a Error saying that it couldn't mount the CD-ROM Drive.

The Minishell you got allows you to mount the CD-ROM manually:

mount /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /newroot/mnt/gentoo

after that:

exit

and normal bootprcess should resume

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## wolfmann

 *Linki wrote:*   

> For those who having problems with Gentoo 1.4 and a USB or Firewire CD-ROM when prober booting fails.
> 
> If got a Error saying that it couldn't mount the CD-ROM Drive.
> 
> The Minishell you got allows you to mount the CD-ROM manually:
> ...

 

that won't work because the firewire drivers don't get auto-loaded (tried modprobing sbp2 ieee1394, etc) from initrd from what I can tell. I installed gentoo via a 1.2 disk(worked perfectly) and used the new (1.4) stage1 2 or 3, forgot which stage but works fine now.

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