I am thinking about reverting back to using the internal memory to boot from. My main reason for this is that it my plug boots from internal memory on a soft reboot anyhow and I am really only using my plug to run pytivo and serve videos (so I don't anticipate running into the issue of filling up my internal memory).

I have a few questions:

1) Is it possible to avoid booting from internal memory on soft reboots? I don't want to NEED to be next to the plug when rebooting in order for the system to come back up correctly.

2) How can I copy/mirror my filesystem that I have set up on the USB drive back to the internal memory? (not all of the data files, only the ubuntu/tonido/app files)

3) I saw this post about rsync. Can this be used to accomplish #2? Can this be used to simply keep the filesystem on the USB drive and internal memory sync'd up?

4) If I do move back to internal memory booting only, how do I safely remove the filesystem on my USB drive without deleting my data?

5) I currently only use Plug Admin, Explorer and Webshare Pro from the Tonido apps. If I decide to use some of the other apps down the line, will I run into trouble with the apps filling up the internal memory rather than the USB disk (I will continue to have it attached)?

I will let other folks answer some of the other questions. But for (5), Tonido is designed for running from the internal memory. For apps that take a lot of space, they will use an external hard drive.

Back to internal memory from what? A USB flash drive or hard drive? I followed the directions at the URL below and have soft rebooted (and hard booted) my plug about a dozen times without it failing to boot off of the usb hard drive each time. I'm using a 2.5" Western Digital Passport Portable 120GB if it makes a difference.

http://www.tonido.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=312

If you have a USB connected to the plug, then just rename the /boot directory to /boot1. Now plug will always boot from your internal flash.
Just copy the /root/app/ directory back into the internal flash. You can use eitther copy command or rsync command. Copy is simple to use. Rsync will be more powerful for syncs, since it copies only those source files which differs from the target.
Once you rename the /boot directory on the USB drive and reboot, your plug will be automatically booted on the internal flash. Now you can mount or unmount the USB drive without any issues.

Excellent. So if I do this for my internal boot directory rather than my USB, it will force it to always boot off of USB?



Thanks for the details. What is the path to the internal memory when booting from USB? I assume that everything from the root directory (/) is USB not internal?

Also, that's an interesting datapoint, RaiD. I am currently running my plug off a USB hard drive (Samsung Story Station 1.5TB). I don't know why mine boots from internal on soft reboots but from USB on hard reboots. I saw someone else with a similar issue on here so I thought it was always the case. If it isn't, I would be fine just keeping everything on the USB drive. I will try Tuxedo's method.

An additional question I just thought of, can my USB hard drive be set to spin down when idle? I haven't verified for sure that it doesn't but whenever I access my video files from my Tivos, the listings are instantaneous. When I ran pytivo off of my PC, they would take a while to load because the disk was spinning up. Maybe this is because I am running my filesystem off of the hard drive as well? Might spin-down if I did move back to internal memory?

Hi,

No, I didnt mean that. I assumed you have your plug getting booted from the USB drive always on soft reboot and you want it to boot from internal flash. Don't change the boot directory in the internal flash. If you have a USB drive which is bootable then it overrides the internal flash. Having said that, posts from users denote that some USB models boot fully (both hard reboot and soft reboot), some do only soft and some doesn't boot at all.

No, it doesn't boot from USB on soft reboots (only hard reboots, power pull). I want the ability to update software, etc and allow the device to soft reboot and have it recover to the point where it is still running the settings that I want (USB root settings).

How do I go about copying the files back to the internal memory? What directory is the internal memory when I have booted from the USB drive?

I haven't heard an answer for this, so I tried to do a bit of searching to find the answer. The closest thing I found was this post on computingplugs.com. It is for the sheevaplug rather than the tonidoplug, but I think they both use Ubuntu 9.04 to start. Is the internal NAND filesystem on /dev/mtdblock1 when I boot from USB? I am still trying to figure out how to copy my files/settings from my USB boot back to the internal NAND.

If you have more than 1 drive connected through a hub its a crap shoot as to which usb drive it will boot from. I ran into this when I was running of a usb stick for my rootfs while having 2 other hdd's plugged in. Sometimes it would boot from the stick and sometimes internal flash.

I only have 1 drive connected with no hub. It repeatably boots off of USB on hard reboots and internal on soft reboots.