[arch-general] BTRFS USB key fails to boot

[Zhengyu Xu]

On Mon, 2012-07-30 at 17:36 -0400, Kyle wrote:
> Trying to install Arch on a USB key, I am having trouble getting a bootable system. I created a basic BTRFS filesystem and mounted it with SSD optimizations and compression. I didn't create any subvolumes or anything else that is said to be problematic when booting to a BTRFS filesystem. From that point, I followed the installation guide for a normal install. However, after reading the documentation for GRUB and Syslinux, my newly created install doesn't boot. I looked at the wiki entry for installing to a USB key, but it is still written for AIF and grub-legacy. However, the main difference I can find doesn't seem to apply, because although it mentions that the USB key where grub-legacy is installed is always hd0,0, grub2 is supposed to look for the UUID of the disk, which matches correctly in /boot/grub/grub.cfg. I also tried setting up this install to boot using Syslinux, but both bootloaders just drop me into some kind of shell and refuse to boot. Unfortunately, since I am
> visually impaired and use speech to install and use Arch, I am unable to see whether I am in a "normal shell" or a rescue shell, or even what kind of issue the bootloaders are having that keeps them from finding a kernel. Should I be using a different filesystem other than BTRFS, even though both bootloaders are said to support it? Should I not be using compression on my filesystem? Could this be a problem that is entirely unrelated to the filesystem I'm using? Any help is greatly appreciated.
> ~Kyle

Did you add usb and btrfs to the hooks array in your mkinitcpio.conf?

Regards,
Zhengyu Xu