[arch-general] BTRFS USB key fails to boot

[Zhengyu Xu]

I've no idea on how btrfs performs with a flash disk actually. My btrfs partition just locates on a normal hdd so I have never thought about it :-)

Regards,
Zhengyu Xu

On 2012-7-31, at 8:27, Δημήτρης Ζέρβας<01ttouch at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>> 
>> 
>>