getut2
June 10th, 2016, 01:10 PM
I have some ECS Liva X2 mini PC's that have 32GB eMMC disks in them that I am trying to set up as hardened remote desktop machines. As part of the hardening, I plan to run the system from a static ISO located on the hard drive. There are plenty of tutorials out there to get an Ubuntu iso booting from grub2 on a machine.
The Liva X2 is presenting me with some problems though.
Problem 1: I can only get Ubuntu 16.04 to see the eMMC drive if I boot the system in UEFI mode. If I boot it in legacy mode, the Ubuntu live USB can't see the eMMC disk.
Problem 2: I'm having trouble getting grub to see the iso images.All the searches I do for this show setting up grub to find ISO's on traditional hard drives on machines with BIOS. I've seen some indication that it might work with UUID's and see a grub line that starts with the command "search" to get it to use UUID instead of partition numbering (I can find no docs on how grub would number an eMMC partition). But even if I DID get this working with UUID, I would prefer to use partition numbering because I am going to be imaging this setup over 100 times. I don't want to have to change all the UUID's. I'd rather just use plain partition numbers. But regardless, I haven't even gotten this to work with UUID's.
Basically I have the system configured like this:
/dev/mmcblk0p1 = /boot/efi
/dev/mmcblk0p2 = /
/dev/mmcblk0p3 = <extra partition I mount as needed>
/dev/mmcblk0p4 = swap
I have 3 bootable installs (if everything was working right) on the machine.
1) I have a real, native install that was installed from USB disk in the traditional way that is using partitions 1, 2 and 4 in the normal way. I plan to password protect this boot entry in grub and remove its default boot state. I may also just purposely bork this install and remove it completely after I get grub booting to the 2 ISO's below.
2) I have an ISO image dropped in the root of partition 2
3) I have an ISO image dropped in the root of partition 3
Please help me get this booting.
The Liva X2 is presenting me with some problems though.
Problem 1: I can only get Ubuntu 16.04 to see the eMMC drive if I boot the system in UEFI mode. If I boot it in legacy mode, the Ubuntu live USB can't see the eMMC disk.
Problem 2: I'm having trouble getting grub to see the iso images.All the searches I do for this show setting up grub to find ISO's on traditional hard drives on machines with BIOS. I've seen some indication that it might work with UUID's and see a grub line that starts with the command "search" to get it to use UUID instead of partition numbering (I can find no docs on how grub would number an eMMC partition). But even if I DID get this working with UUID, I would prefer to use partition numbering because I am going to be imaging this setup over 100 times. I don't want to have to change all the UUID's. I'd rather just use plain partition numbers. But regardless, I haven't even gotten this to work with UUID's.
Basically I have the system configured like this:
/dev/mmcblk0p1 = /boot/efi
/dev/mmcblk0p2 = /
/dev/mmcblk0p3 = <extra partition I mount as needed>
/dev/mmcblk0p4 = swap
I have 3 bootable installs (if everything was working right) on the machine.
1) I have a real, native install that was installed from USB disk in the traditional way that is using partitions 1, 2 and 4 in the normal way. I plan to password protect this boot entry in grub and remove its default boot state. I may also just purposely bork this install and remove it completely after I get grub booting to the 2 ISO's below.
2) I have an ISO image dropped in the root of partition 2
3) I have an ISO image dropped in the root of partition 3
Please help me get this booting.