Booting from a USB Drive

[Steve Holmes]

OK, Thanks for the advice.  Alas, that still didn't work.  What is
still happening is the RAMFS boots fine and the final messages shown
before it barfs indicate that it found my internal haard drive and its
4 windows partitions.  But then it shows /dev/sdb to be a mass storage
device but it never shows the 2 partitions (sdb1 and sdb2) as I would
expect.  I'm beginning to wonder if and how people are getting a
system to boot strait from a USB device like this.  The pre-built ISOs
work and the system is running under the live image but For whatever
reason, the UDEV stuff isn't discovering the existing partitions on
the USB drive when it is the same device being used to boot in the
first place.  I may need to bring my laptop in to either Thursday's
east side meeting or this Saturday's install fest to show the errors
to someone who might know more.  It seems like what should have been
an easy solution but I think the USB stuff is getting in the way some
how.

Another thread on the list here shows a guy doing exactly what I'm
trying to do; have my machine remain native windows for now and boot
with a full distro on a portable hard disk.  I wonder what else I
might be missing here.

On Sat, Dec 04, 2010 at 06:35:40PM -0700, Joseph Sinclair wrote:
> Steve,
>   I would start over with ext3, and this time I would recommend using UUID as the drive identification method, as that method is resistant to the reordering/remapping that you're experiencing (UUID was introduced exactly because modern controllers may reorder drives on boot).
> 
> ==Joseph++
> 
> Steve Holmes wrote:
> > Well, I have some more progress or updates on this problem.  I still
> > can't get the thing to but from the USB external drive but here is
> > what I have so far.  Sorry for the lengthy details.
> > 
> > 1. I found out that when I start the HP laptop and use the boot menu
> > to choose the USB drive, grub picks up the devices in the opposite
> > order than what I knew them to be while running from a live CD.
> > 
> > 2. So I reconfigured the menu.lst file in grub to use (hd0,0) instead
> > of the former (hd1,0).
> > 
> > 3. When I boot now, grub starts up and when I pick the menu item, the
> > RAM FS begins to load.  But then I get a message saying that it is
> > waiting for a device and after 10 seconds, it dumps me to an emergency
> > shell - probably inside the RAMFS.
> > 
> > At this point, I could determine that the kernel was scanning devices
> > and was now mapping the internal hard drive to /dev/sda and it showed
> > the 4 windows partitions.  But for /dev/sdb, no file systems! It
> > looked like UDEV was seeing the device but not able to recognize the
> > file systems.  Yet, this very drive is what I installed the stuff on
> > to and when I run from the Arch install CD, this USB drive shows up
> > just fine.  I thought I would try ext4 as the file systems on this
> > drive; I'm beginning to wonder if I should scrap the whole thing and
> > do it over with ext3 instead.  I thought if Arch installer supports
> > ext4 when building that it should be able to boot with it.  Is there
> > any chance the kernel wasn't built to support ext4 or something?
> > 
> > Should I look for anything else?
> > 
> 
> 



> ---------------------------------------------------
> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
> http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss