Booting from a USB Drive

[Lisa Kachold]

We have a joint install/hack fest at UAT next Saturday the 11th also?



On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 9:33 AM, Steve Holmes <steve at holmesgrown.com> wrote:

> 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?
> > >
> >
> >
>
>
>
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