External Hard Drives
The purpose of this page is to describe which external hard drive / USB enclosure combinations have worked successfully with the Sheevaplug.<br /> The criteria for success is either mountable and used reliably for a period of days. An additional indicator is if the hard drive /enclosure combination can be used to boot the SheevaPlug. If using an external hub please note make and model and not just yes.
See below the table for instructions on how to make the SheeavPlug boot kernel and RFS from an external hard drive
Please maintain the formatting and alphabetize by manufacturer and model when adding to the table.
| Manufacturer | Drive Model and type | Enclosure Model and type | Mountable | Boots | Plug Powered | External Hub | notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Buffalo | MiniStation HD-PF320U2 | N/A | yes | no tested | yes | no | |
| Hitachi | DK23EA-40 IDE | macally phr-250 cc | yes | yes | yes | no | |
| Maxtor | OneTouch4 | N/A | yes | not tested | not tested | no | |
| PNY | Optima SSD 64GB | none | yes | yes | yes | no | Plug has external 2.5A power supply |
| Samsung | HM500JI | FANTEC fanbox FB-C25US | yes | not tested | not tested | yes | |
| Samsung | MP0804H/SCC (2.5in) | Icy Box 250U | yes | no tested | yes | no | |
| Samsung | S2 320GB | N/A | yes | not tested | yes | no | |
| Western Digital | WD1600ME-01 USB | N/A | yes | yes | yes | no | |
| Western Digital | WD2500ME-01 USB | N/A | yes | yes | yes | no | |
| Western Digital | WD5000CSRTL Caviar Green SATA | Rosewill R2-JBOD USB | yes | not tested | not tested | Belkin 4-port Powered USB hub F5U404-BLK-TG | |
| Western Digital | WD5000MLC-00 USB | My Passport Elite(500GB) | yes | not tested | yes | no |
The wiki page http://www.openplug.org/plugwiki/index.php/U-Boot_Quick_Reference has information on u-boot settings.
In particular I use the following settings to boot the kernel and rootfs from the external USB HDD drive
setenv bootcmd 'usb start; ext2load usb 0:1 0x8000000 /boot/uImage; bootm 0x8000000; reset'
setenv bootargs 'console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/sda5 rootdelay=10 rw'
For reference my HDD is partitioned as follows :
Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 38154 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 32 32752 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 33 38154 39036928 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 33 37432 38297584 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 37433 38154 739312 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Partition sizes are in MB
sda1 is formatted ext2 and has uImage in /boot
sda5 is formatted ext3
