Quick question re partitioning and formatting storage

dklinkman · 27 Nov 2015, 03:53

Brand new Omega user here. But not new to Linux.

I plugged a 32GB USB drive into the expansion dock and it shows up as /dev/sda. So far so good.

Tried to partition it using fdisk /dev/sda but that only displays information. Typically that would return a partitioning menu.

Also mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 doesn't work. Command not found.

OpenWRT Wiki suggest these commands should work. https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/storage

But obviously there is something I don't know or understand in Omega land.

I am able to mount and access the default FAT partition on the USB just fine.

Nayan · 27 Nov 2015, 07:07

Hi @David-Klinkman... I think you can find what you need here: https://wiki.onion.io/Tutorials/Using-USB-Storage

dklinkman · 27 Nov 2015, 14:41

So there's no way to partition or format USB storage? I can only mount and dismount the storage?

Boken Lin · 27 Nov 2015, 21:19

@David-Klinkman Ah, i see what you are trying to do. We just don't have fdisk and mkfs installed to conserve disk space. However, if you have setup a cross-compile environment for the Omega, you can add these commands into the firmware. It should be located under the build menu for busybox.

Let me know if you have the cross-compile environment set up and we can walk you through how to compile fdisk and mkfs.

dklinkman · 27 Nov 2015, 23:48

Ok now I understand the minimalist OS for Omega due to limited storage. I don't have a cross -compile environment but I do have other Linux instances where I can prepare a storage device if I want. More than anything I was just curious why fdisk would display partitions but not modify or create them. Now I know.

Thanks for your response!!!

Jan Freund · 28 Nov 2015, 18:42

got actually the cross compile environment. since i'll use one of my onion's as a CUPS printer server and the packages don't have the "cups" installed from beginning, i need to compile the whole thing.
and also as the omega just has a small amount of storage, i need it to run it from a USB-stick. As there are no utils to mount a stick at boot, i need to make a custom image, or am i wrong?

Boken Lin · 28 Nov 2015, 19:42

@Jan-Freund You should be able to insert a script snippet in your profile script to automatically mount a USD drive (as well as to run any command you need to start the CUPS service).

Jan Freund · 28 Nov 2015, 21:55

compiled my own package and kill'd my onion
the instruction (in corss-compile tutorial @ Step 7) is saying something of downloading a image?
with some trying i managed to rescue it by loading it on a USB and copy it to the /tmp folder and re "sysupdate" it to the actual omega build.

so @Boken-Lin i can run the unpacked CUPS packages from the USB drive? or do i still need to selfcompile the build to get the openwrt packages to run the server plus work with the printer?

Boken Lin · 28 Nov 2015, 22:10

@Jan-Freund Yes, you should be able to run any binary directly from the USB drive.