Booting from a USB Drive

[Steve Holmes]

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?

On Wed, Dec 01, 2010 at 08:40:44AM -0700, Stephen wrote:
> 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
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