installer - MCCBLK devices not found

[coaxguy99]

I have a laptop that identifies storage as mccblk0 instead of deva/b etc. The Salix installer doesn't find it so I am unable to select a location for installation. Any idea how to overcome the problem? I've installed other distros without a problem. Even on the live Salix usb, Gparted sees the mccblk0 device, there is just no way to select it from the installer. I tried to search this board and couldn't find a related thread so my apologies if this is a repeat question.

[gapan]

I'm sure you mean mmcblk. That is typical for nvme drives and I'm also sure our standard installer supports them just fine. I'm currently writing from a laptop with such a drive.

I'm not sure about the live installer though. djemos should be able to answer that.

[djemos]

Live installer supports installation to nvme drives (nvme0n1 nvme1n1 nvme2n1 nvme3n1 nvme4n1 nvme5n1, etc) I have a nvme laptop and live installer finds it. I do not know about mmcblk drives. Or i have to change the source code to search for that drive. But i do not have such a device to test it.

you said that Gparted sees the mccblk0 device. Did you create there an ext4 partition for example? Then closing the gparted can you select it from live installer?

Edit: To check if live installer see mmcblk drives. While on live environment and before to run sli type in a terminal

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sudo geany /usr/sbin/sli-location-detection.sh

add this line after line 24

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 mmcblk0 mmcblk1 mmcblk2 mmcblk3 mmcblk4 mmcblk5 mmcblk6 mmcblk7 mmcblk8 mmcblk9 \ 

Line 24 to 29 will look now like this.

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for disks in sda sdb sdc sdd sde sdf sdg sdh sdi sdj sdk sdl sdm sdn sdo sdp sd \
     mmcblk0 mmcblk1 mmcblk2 mmcblk3 mmcblk4 mmcblk5 mmcblk6 mmcblk7 mmcblk8 mmcblk9 \
     nvme0n1 nvme1n1 nvme2n1 nvme3n1 nvme4n1 nvme5n1 nvme6n1 nvme7n1 nvme8n1 nvme9n1 \
     nvme0n2 nvme1n2 nvme2n2 nvme3n2 nvme4n2 nvme5n2 nvme6n2 nvme7n2 nvme8n2 nvme9n2 \
     nvme0n3 nvme1n3 nvme2n3 nvme3n3 nvme4n3 nvme5n3 nvme6n3 nvme7n3 nvme8n3 nvme9n3 \
     nvme0n4 nvme1n4 nvme2n4 nvme3n4 nvme4n4 nvme5n4 nvme6n4 nvme7n4 nvme8n4 nvme9n4  ; do

save the file and run the sli (salix live installer)
If installer see the mmcblk drive do the installation.

[gapan]

Oh, I see I made a mistake. I wrote nvme drive, but I really wanted to write ssd. mmcblk is the kind of ssd drives that are usually soldered on laptop motherboards.

And I also remembered that, while it works for me, the standard installer doesn't actually support them out of the box. The installer boots, it completes the installation, but then it won't boot. The reason for that is that, unfortunately, the huge kernel does not include the necessary modules to boot from mmcblk drives.

So, what you have to do, is that after the installation completes, you need to mount the drive, install the kernel-generic package (+friends) and then create an initrd for your system, which you will use in your bootloader.

Assuming /dev/mmcblkp0 is your /boot/efi and /dev/mmcblkp1 is your /...

1. Download the kernel-generic, kernel-modules and kernel-headers packages from here:
http://slackware.uk/slackware/slackware ... -5.15.161/ (64bit)
or
http://slackware.uk/slackware/slackware ... -5.15.161/ (32bit - you probably need the -smp packages)
2. Put those on another USB drive (assuming this appears as /dev/sda2 in your installer/live session)
3. From the installer command line (or the live image I guess), mount everything, chroot into it, install the new packages and create an initrd:

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mkdir /mmc
mount /dev/mmcblkp1 /mmc
mount /dev/mmcblkp0 /mmc/boot/efi
mkdir /mmc/usb
mount /dev/sda2 /mmc/usb 
mount --bind /dev /mmc/dev
mount --bind /proc /mmc/proc
mount --bind /sys /mmc/sys
chroot /mmc
spkg /usb/*.txz # the kernel packages should be in the root directory of your usb drive for this to work, otherwise change the path accordingly
geninitrd # this should create an initrd.gz file in /boot

4. If you're using elilo (from the standard installer), edit your /boot/efi/EFI/Salix-Xfce-15.0/elilo.conf file, add a

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        initrd=initrd.gz

line under the image line and also copy the initrd and kernel-generic into that directory

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cp /boot/initrd.gz /boot/efi/EFI/Salix-Xfce-15.0/
cp /boot/vmlinuz-generic /boot/efi/EFI/Salix-Xfce-15.0/vmlinuz

That should probably do it. I'm writing these from memory so I might be missing something.

If you're using grub (from the live installer), then you should probably do something similar to update its configuration. Once again, djemos might be able to help more with that.

I know, it's not easy. I've wanted to update the installer for this, but I never got to it. It will all work with the next release, since slackware-current moved to using kernel-generic only, but noone knows when that will be.

[coaxguy99]

Sorry. Yex, I do mean mmcblk. The current installer can't find it. Thank you for your responses! I am anjoying Salix and would like to be able to install it on that laptop, if possible.

[coaxguy99]

I'll wait until the installer is updated. Thank you for the speedy response! I will just roll with Mageia on that laptop for now. It's working well. I just just really like Salix because it is so fast and resource usage is the best I've encountered on any linux. Your implementation of XFCE is ellegant!