Booting from a USB Drive

[Steve Holmes]

The drive boots after all but only as far as grub.  I found out
earlier today that the grub menu comes up but it fails to find the
file systems for booting the actual system.  It looks like I will have
to rebuild the grub configuration or something.  So yes, you're right;
the drive should boot and the MBR does work; it's just the rest of it
that doesn't but that sounds more like a grub issue now rather than
booting from the USB drive.  Somehow while preparing this disk with
the Arch Linux installer, I think grub's identification of drives may
have been off or something.  I almost wrecked my windows internal disk
doing this some how but at least I salvaged that for now so I need to
walk on some egg shells while doing this I guess.

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 05:34:31PM -0700, Lisa Kachold wrote:
> If the drive is bootable, it will boot.
> 
> Check the bios to ensure you have allowed boot from bios, and use spare
> systems before rebuilding your drive.
> 
> You should be able to fdisk -l /dev/sdN  (or whatever it is) plugged in and
> verify the boot.  You should be able to verify your MBR and GRUB settings
> also.  You can always REPEAT setting up the MBR?
> 
> If you can't boot it, it's not built.
> 
> Rebuild with a better set of instructions!
> 
> On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 9:57 AM, Stephen <cryptworks at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > newer machines should be able to boot directly to USB hdd just fine...
> > just never have had a drive that really worked with that.
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Steve Holmes <steve at holmesgrown.com>
> > wrote:
> > > That's rather annoying when some drive manufacturer forces us to leave
> > > their junk on the drive when we wish to do otherwise with it.
> > > Actually, my drive came out of an old laptop and I stuck it inside a
> > > portable drive enclosure so I would think we should be able to boot
> > > with it.  I used grub to make this disk bootable or at least attempt
> > > to do so.
> > >
> > > I might have to do a grub-install to the /dev/sda MBR but I hesitate
> > > to do so at the moment.
> > >
> > > On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 07:25:08AM -0700, Stephen wrote:
> > >> I have an external drive that has the same issue. in my case there is
> > >> a small "firmware" that resides on the USB-PATA bridge that has about
> > >> 3-400 MB of stuff on it and mounts as a CD. this definitely fouled all
> > >> my attempts at booting to the device.
> > >>
> > >> On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 3:23 AM, Steve Holmes <steve at holmesgrown.com>
> > wrote:
> > >> > I got a new machine which (of course) has Windows pre-installed and
> > >> > I'm not ready to dump it entirely just yet so in the meantime, I built
> > >> > out a complete Arch Linux 64-bit system on a portable USB external
> > >> > drive.  I also used or tried to use grub to set it up to boot.  During
> > >> > the original settup session, it appeared to do all this OK but I can't
> > >> > get the laptop to recognize or boot from this device.  I did not
> > >> > modify the master boot record on my laptop; instead, I figured on
> > >> > using the boot menu on the laptop to choose the USB drive; this method
> > >> > works beautifully with an ISO image I burned to a small thumbdrive but
> > >> > I cannot do the same with my larger USB portable drive on which I
> > >> > installed Arch Linux.  Do I have to do anything else to make this
> > >> > thing bootable?
> > >> > ---------------------------------------------------
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> > >> >
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> --
> > >> A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from
> > >> rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.
> > >>
> > >> Stephen
> > >> ---------------------------------------------------
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> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from
> > rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.
> >
> > Stephen
> > ---------------------------------------------------
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> >
> 
> 
> 
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