very dumb question regarding flash drive for OS

[regder]

I'm sure this is very stupid, but forgive my noobness. Do you need to use a usb flash drive or can I just use a regular usb external hard drive that I intend to use as a NAS

[moonman]

You can use the hdd.

[WarheadsSE]

As a matter of fact, we recommend spinning rust over flash

[regder]

Thanks guys, too bad I dropped my external drive this morning and killed it. Ooops

Need to find another now

[regder]

So finally got around to doing this. Unfortunately the Pogoplug doesn't want to boot Archlinux from the hard drive, just loads into the regular Pogoplug software. If I switch it back to my usb flash drive, it works fine.

Any ideas? I redid the install from step one btw

Thanks

[moonman]

Now that it boots into stock OS, re-do it from scratch. You must have missed a step. Also do you have anything else plugged in into USB ports? With my plug I have to have my boot drive connected to the very top USB port on the back for it to boot up.

[regder]

Tried again, no go

Only have the one 2tb drive plugged in to the top port, nothing else.

[moonman]

run these and show the output here:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'fdisk -l')
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'cd /tmp
mkdir usb
mount /dev/sda1 usb
cd /tmp/usb
ls -l')
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'cd /tmp/usb/boot
ls -l')

[regder]

Disk /dev/sda: 2000.3 GB, 2000365289472 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243197 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 243197 1953479871 83 Linux

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 1 01:01 bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 1 01:01 boot
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 1 01:01 dev
drwxr-xr-x 34 root root 4096 Jan 1 01:01 etc
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 21 2011 home
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 Jan 1 2000 lib
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Jan 1 00:53 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 21 2011 media
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 21 2011 mnt
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 21 2011 opt
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 21 2011 proc
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 Jan 14 2012 root
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 21 2011 run
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 1 2000 sbin
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jan 1 2000 srv
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 21 2011 sys
drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 4096 Jan 14 2012 tmp
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 Jan 1 2000 usr
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4096 Jan 1 2000 var

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2851432 Jan 14 2012 uImage

thanks!

[moonman]

Ok, I your problem seems to be that your boot partition is >32GB. I *think* U-Boot has problems with large boot partitions.

Now start over from step 4 and create more partitions with fdisk. Make your first partition < 20 GB. Mine is 10GB Then continue with other steps as instructed in the guide.

EDIT: You will probably need a swap partition ~1 Gig, and the rest can be used to store whatever you want. So create 3 partitions with the sizes I specified. When you boot up ArchLinux you will need to format the Storage partition and make use of swap (in the guides)