How to transfer Ununtu11.04/Pandaboard to USB HDD

The pre-built Ubuntu 11.04/Pandaboard image is designed to be installed on a SD card. It could be transfer to the USB HDD with some extra efforts. Typically, a bootable OMAP4/Ubuntu SD card contains two partitions: boot and rootfs. Only rootfs should immigrate to a USB drive since Pandaboard requires booting form SD card.

1. Prepares a bootable Ubuntu11.04 SD card. howto
2. Create a ext3/4 partition on a USB HDD labeled "ubuntu".

# /dev/sdXX should be the partition to be formatted,
# for example /dev/sdc2
$ sudo mkfs.ext3 -L ubuntu /dev/sdXX

3. Copy rootfs on the SD card to USB HDD

# Suppose USB is mounted on /mnt/ubuntu
# and rootfs of SD is on /mnt/sd
$ cd /mnt/ubuntu
$ sudo cp -a /mnt/sd/* .

4. Boot from SD card
In order to mount USB HDD as rootfs, It'd update parameters that passed to the kernel. The configuration file is located at /boot/boot.script

$ sudo vi /boot/boot.script

You'd find bootargs have something like this:

root=UUID=XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX

Replace it to

root=LABEL=ubuntu

Then update boot.scr for uboot using:

$ sudo flash-kernel

5. Reboot it and Ubuntu should use USB HDD as root filesystem. :)