Booting from a USB Drive

[Steve Holmes]

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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