Larger, greener, quieter: Kurobox changes

320Gb just isn’t enough nowadays, for a machine-under-the-stairs packed full music in flac format, video and digital photos… so an upgrade was needed. And while the hard disk is being upgraded, I thought I’d help it spin down by putting the root filesystem on a USB stick.

Ingredients

1x Buffalo 8Gb Thumbkey
1x KURO-SATA (because the Kurobox HG only has a PATA controller)
1x Western Digital Green 1Tb hard disk

WD 1Tb hard disk, KURO-SATA and Buffalo Thumbkey

Re-installation of the OS

An upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) was also overdue, so I debootstrapped straight onto the thumb drive. The only complication with this is that the version of U-Boot on the Kurobox has no support for booting from USB – so I needed to create a small boot partition on the hard disk, containing the kernel and Kurobox device tree. The thumb drive is large enough to handle a swap partition too, but I don’t anticipate it getting much use.

Once I was running the root filesystem exclusively from the Buffalo memory stick, I installed the new hard disk in a USB enclosure, added a small boot partition and copied the kernel and device tree to it. Note: the version of ‘fdisk’ I used would only support 0.5Tb drives. ‘cfdisk’ allowed me to partition the whole lot.

Fitting the hard disk, and KURO-SATA

This was very easy, given that the KURO-SATA (IDE-to-SATA adapter) is designed specifically for the Kurobox. These pictures should tell most of the story.