From: Steve Holmes [USB drive, GRUB installed on its bootsector] > Now when I boot the machine and choose USB from the BIOS boot menu, > grub starts up but now the USB drive is (hd0) and the internal disk is > (hd1). Now at this point, I get the boot menu with the two Arch > linux entries and after choosing the first one, the initial RAMFS > loads so at this point, my USB drive is accessed fine. It's using BIOS functions to read the kernel and ramfs/initrd/whatever at this point, so this is only to be expected. > But [after the kernel loads], my internal hard disk is being > discovered to be /dev/sda and shown accordingly. This time, > /dev/sdb wasn't even mentioned. After getting dumped out into > the emergency shell, I decided to try looking for /dev/disk > and then went into the by-label directory and saw entries for sda1, > sda3 and sda4. No mention of my linux partition. Does your initrd/ramfs/whatever have the ehci_hcd, scsi_mod, sd_mod, usbcore, and usb_storage modules available in it? Are those modules loaded? If this thing was always going to run from a USB drive and I had control over the kernel, I'd build a custom kernel with all those things built-in, not as modules, to avoid that particular set of problems. (BTDT back in 1999, but with ELF binary support as , seriously, so the kernel loaded but /sbin/init couldn't execute. Sigh. It was a great learning experience.) > even though it just loaded the RAMFS from that same device just > a few moments before. Does this make any sense? Yes, if you know the intricacies of the semi-kludgy way the x86 boot process and the bootloader do all of their junk :-P >>> Steve Holmes wrote: >>>> the RAMFS boots fine and the final messages shown before it barfs >>>> indicate that it found my internal hard 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) This is a totally different problem, and it doesn't totally jive with what you wrote above ("/dev/sdb wasn't even mentioned"). If it can see the USB drive, but it can't see the partitions on the drive, then the drive may have been put together with a non-x86 partition layout. In that case, you have to build the kernel with support for whatever partition layout's on the drive. There are a bunch of them. GPT, OS X, whatever, they can all be used for a Linux system. The x86 BIOS only groks a couple of them though. -- Matt G / Dances With Crows The Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress/ There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss