Booting from a USB Drive

[Stephen]

I think it is having trouble with the order of hardware devices.

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 11:10 PM, Steve Holmes <steve at holmesgrown.com> wrote:
> 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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-- 
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