[9fans] installing on a usb disk

[Jeff Sickel <jas@corpus-callosum.com>]

Something has changed in a recent VMware update that now prevents me from just using dd to clone my Plan 9 VMware instance onto a CF device (the MBR is no longer set correctly after using dd).  Now I'm looking for a way to get Plan 9 to mount and clone a file system over to a SanDisk CF device, does anyone have any pointers on getting this to work?

I can see the device in /n/usb/sdU0.0, the geometry 'looks' correct.  But I can't cleanly mount the device and have it show up consistently in /dev/ for all the disk tools to have at it.

If I do:

	usb/disk

I get "no device found".  But if instead the command is:

	usb/usbfat:

I get /dev/sdU0.0 and /dev/sdU0.1 with plausible trees (ctl data raw).  The sdU0.0 corresponds to a usb/probe that returns:

	ep3.0 storage csp 0x500608 vid 0x0781 did 0xa1a2 'SanDisk ' 'Extreme III USB2.0 Reader/Writer' ehci


So far I've found that the following process gets me most of the way there:

cpu% mount /srv/usb /n/usb
cpu% disk/partfs /n/usb/sdU0.0/data
cpu% disk/mbr -m /386/mbr /dev/sdXX/data
cpu% disk/fdisk -baw /dev/sdXX/data
cpu% disk/prep /dev/sdXX/plan9
  9fat                  0 204800     (204800 sectors, 100.00 MB)
  nvram            204800 204801     (1 sectors, 512 B )
  fossil           204801 3211674    (3006873 sectors, 1.43 GB)
  swap            3211674 3963393    (751719 sectors, 367.05 MB)
  empty           3963393 3999618    (36225 sectors, 17.68 MB)


A little tweak corrects for the empty space.  After getting this far, how safe is doing:

   dd -if=/dev/sdC0/fossil -of=/dev/sdXX/fossil

I get my Soekris box booting off of this, but it is not optimal.  USB dd transfers are SLOW, as in it took over an hour and a half for dd to complete the above command.

-jas