GUI unavailible in Raspbian when root on USB

[davidsstar]

I'm trying to use a USB stick for Raspbian root directory, instead of an SD card.

So far I have:
1) extracted root.tar.xz to an ext4 formatted USB stick (Raspbian “wheezy” OS, from NOOBS download page)
2) extracted boot.tar.xz to a FAT32 formatted SD card (Raspbian “wheezy” OS, from NOOBS download page)
3) edited boot cmdline.txt flag to "root=/dev/sda1"

The pi boots up nicely into command line but as soon as I try startx the raspbian reports: "unable to connect to X server: No such file or directory"

I don't suppose there is a simple answer to this, like a script somewhere on root that I can edit, so that raspbian "knows" root resides in dev/sda1, not dev/mmcblk0p2?

btw: I have a 512mb sd card for my root directory and a 4gb usb stick for root. I have not tried installing using noobs, seeing as this would be impossible with such a small sd card.

Thanks for your consideration,
Davíð James

[Aydan]

I think you may have a permissions or ownership problem from extracting the archives.
The way I'd do it is DD a working root partition from an SD card to your USB stick.

Regards
Aydan

[ShiftPlusOne]

It's important to use the p flag when compressing and extracting. It's better to rsync -av the files across, anyway.

[gkreidl]

or follow this great guide:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewt ... b+tutorial

[davidsstar]

Great advice guys. I will give all the suggestions a try and report back here tomorrow for anyone that might be interested.

Cheers,
Davíð