[arch-general] BTRFS USB key fails to boot

[Δημήτρης Ζέρβας]

is it actually safe to format an usb flash to btrfs? won't it destroy the
flash because of the read/writes?
On Jul 31, 2012 2:20 AM, "Zhengyu Xu" <xzy3186 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>