[syslinux] Locally attached disk is seen, 40 gig PATA in USB enclosure is not.

[Chris Miller]

Hi Gene,

Please see interlinear comments.

Chris.

Fill what's empty, empty what's full, and scratch where it itches.
Life is a journey, not a destination ...

 

> In the future, also take a look at /proc/kallsyms.  This 
> shows all symbols from modules and compiled in code in the 
> kernel.  Few kernels are compiled with the USB storage 
> symbols built into the kernel.  If you know the name of a 
> kernel module file (ie usb-storage.ko), you can search for 
> its symbols (look like usb_storage).  This is a great 
> suggestion for any time you can't find a storage device once in Linux.
>  Most kernels have PATA (IDE) support compiled in but 
> sometimes USB, SCSI, or SATA (especially AHCI or IRRT) may 
> not be available immediately, especially when it's a newer 
> controller (AHCI and IRRT controllers fall here) and/or an 
> older kernel or less common controller.
> 
> In my system, the line looks like:
> ffffffff88645880 d usb_storage_driver   [usb_storage]
> 
> The bracketed name I believe means that it came from a module 
> and is not built into the kernel.

I am dealing with at least two kernels -- EXTLinux and ISOLinux -- and
possibly three if ISOLinux is booting something else that is shepherding the
installation.  EXTLinux is, as nearly as I can tell, monolithic.  I can't
find any sort of initrd for it that I can modify.  And ISOLinux, which has
an initrd.img already is including the USB module, as nearly as I can tell.
Investigating this is tricky because after gunzipping the cpio archive and
restoring the cpio archive, the symlinks sometimes link to the running
system ...  So, for example, mtab showed mounted filesystems that I knew
could not have been mounted because they were mine.  mtab was a symlink
pointing to my running /proc... hierarchy.

Can you please give me instructions how to determine the answer to your
question, and I will do it.  It is possible that you are right and there is
only one way to find out.

Thanks for your help.

Chris.