Dual Boot FC5 from USB Drive

[nomadxray]

Dear All;

I know this information is spread out over a couple of different posts and doc's and this is based totally on other peoples work so don't ask me (kudos & thanks to those intrepid hackers you know who you are). I'm just going to put it in one place for everyone. This is just for FC5 by the way.

So you say you want to Boot FC5 off your External USB drive.

First you need to make sure your BIOS supports USB boot. If you go into your CMOS setup and see USB Drive in the list of bootable devices you should be ok. If you don't contact your motherboard manufacturer and see if it is possible, To date I don't believe there are any USB cards that have there own built in BIOS like drive controllers do though I could be wrong. It would be pretty cool if someone did make a device like that so that you could have a USB RAID controller. You could have theoretically a 256 drive array; multi-terabyte and pretty darn cheap to.

Well back to the case at hand.

So you say your BIOS supports USB boot, well then lets get cracking.

Install FC5 as your would normally with these exceptions.

First identify your USB drive, it will no doubt be the drive labeled other than /dev/sda (which is usually your local internal hard drive). On my system my USB drive was /dev/sdc.

Place a check or x next to the USB drive in the drive selector list of the Fedora installer. This is the drive where you will be installing your OS, as well as booting from it.

Next format your USB drive in the following manner:

Select custom layout from the drop down list.

I haven't tried to use the default LVM FS setup with this so if you have gotten it to work please post here as well.

Next you will be at the Disk Druid screen. Select create and from the drop down at the top of the window select /boot. Then use the default FS ext3 which should already be selected for you. Make the /boot partition no bigger than 100MB. This will then become the first partition on your USB drive. In my case it was /dev/sdc1.

Select create again. This time you will select the / from the pull down list. You can either make the partition the full size of your hard drive less the 1 - 2 times your system memory which will be needed for the swap partition or something less.

To determine the correct size of your swap partition, take your system memory and multiply it by 1x, or 1.5x, or at most 2x. Fedoras default right now is 1x. So if you have a 1GB of system memory, then your swap partition will be 1GB.

So if you have a 150GB USB drive and you decide to use the entire drive for the Fedora installation your / partition will be 150GB - 100MB(/boot) - 1GB(swap) which equals 148.9GB.

Place that value in the fixed hard drive size field and once again ext3 FS will already be set for you. So / partition will become the 2nd partition on your system which in my case was labeled /dev/sdc2.

Select create for the 3rd and final time and from the pull down list at the top of the window select swap. You can set this to automatically size to what is ever left on your drive which should be the 1GB. Once again ext3 should already be selected, and in my case this drive was labeled /dev/sdc3.

Continue on to the boot loader screen. I've seen doc's that state not to use the boot loader at this point but I found it easier to use GRUB at this point anyway. So select GRUB as your boot loader.

Now here’s where experienced dual booters mite get throw off the track as I did. Usually you place the boot loader in the first sector of the /boot partition. Typically you would do this if you are using a 3rd party OS loaders and selectors as I was. I personally used Acronis OS selector which supports USB Drive Booting as long as the system BIOS supports it.

So in my case experience taught me to install it on /dev/sdc1 which is incorrect. You need to install on the MBR (Master Boot Record). Now before you click away and end up blowing away windows or whatever else you have on your internal hard drive make sure you are placing it the correct MBR. In my case it was /dev/sdc. The installer and my system(Dell E1705) saw that on my internal /dev/sda that there was a Windows partition, as well as a Dell Diagnostic Partition, a Dell Recovery Partition, and I had also installed 2 Novell Suse Linux partitions / & swap. In my case it automatically selected the correct MBR/drive which was /dev/sdc. Plus there was no more space on the internal hard drive for another set of partitions. In your case it may not do that so be careful and check your work. If for whatever reason you aren’t able to select the proper MBR you will need to reboot and start over but first disabling your drive in CMOS or otherwise disconnect from your computer. Disabling it in CMOS should be enough to keep the installer from seeing it.

In addition to get Fedora FC5 2.6.15-1.2054 to see the USB drive I had to hook up a firewire drive to my firewire port. Don't know if this is a bug with the Dell BIOS or Fedora. I tried it with Suse and the software saw the drives independently of each other. It boots find now without the firewire drive being connected but to get it to initially see the drive I had to have both drives connected to the laptop. One thing I noticed that was different when I had both connected and then just the USB drive. With both connected at boot up USB storage, ohci1394 & sbp2 drivers were loaded at startup, and with just the USB drive in left out the sbp2 driver.

If you end up installing on the first boot sector you will get either just a GRUB prompt or a kernel panic when you try and boot the drive.

If you mistakenly install the boot loader on the MBR of your internal hard drive chances are Windows won't boot, and you will either have to repair it with a 3rd party utility or though Windows tools. If not you will have to reinstall so be careful.

Another note to get the Novell Suse Linux installed and dual booting with Windows, as well as the 2 Dell Diagnostic and Recovery partitions on my internal hard drive I had to use the Acronis OS selector to hide those 2 Dell repair partitions otherwise I couldn't install it. If you are having trouble getting FC to work I recommend Novell Suse Linux as an alternative. It’s free to download even though it states it's an evaluation it's the full unrestricted product without any expiration date. It's a little bit more stable as it's equivalent to Redhat’s RHEL product, and it's just as cutting edge as FC. I like both and use both they both have pluses and minuses; for newbie’s Suse mite be the way to go. By the way if you are a student you ca get the full Redhat RHEL4 (AS, ES, WS), plus all of their legacy products back to RH7 for either $25 or $50 a year. You also need to pay for the updates which is about $75.00 year if you so chose.

So you have installed the boot loader on the correct MBR. Just finish the install as you would normally. When it comes time to reboot at the end just stick the DVD/or Rescue CD back in or in, and let the system boot off of it. At the boot command prompt type Linux rescue, it will ask you after a few minutes if you want to load networking up, just select no.

From hoser_9:

chroot /mnt/sysimage

mount /boot # If your boot partition doesn't mount automatically

type mount at the command prompt to see what is mounted.

ls /boot

# Make note of the version in the initrd file-name
# For example: /boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.img
# is version "2.6.15-1.2054_FC5"

hoser_9 recommends deleting your initrd
rm /boot/initrd*

I rather rename it with the move command
mv /boot/initrd.kernelversionnumber.img to /boot/initrd.kernelversionnumber.old

Then type what's below as long as you are using the 2.16.15-1.2054 version if not the previous numbers will be different

mkinitrd --preload ehci-hcd --preload usb-storage --preload scsi_mod --preload sd_mod /boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.img 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5

Ok some of the mistakes I made. My Dell is a Dual Core system so I was using the SMP kernel and forgot to include the smp on the end of 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 so my statement looked like what is below:

mkinitrd --preload ehci-hcd --preload usb-storage --preload scsi_mod --preload sd_mod /boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp.img 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5

If you make this DUH mistake the error message that comes up is:

No modules available for kernel "2.6.15-1.2054_FC5"

Redoing the statement to what's below fixes the problem:

mkinitrd --preload ehci-hcd --preload usb-storage --preload scsi_mod --preload sd_mod /boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp.img 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp

then

umount /boot

exit
exit

You should be able to boot at this point through either your 3rd party boot loader or directly through the system BIOS at startup. Good luck and don't make the same mistakes I did DUH

nomadxray

PS Please comment if I made any mistakes, If this is good correct info it would nice it people made this a sticky for FC5

[nomadxray]

PPS This is just for some Dell users, those diagnostic and recovery partitions I mentioned can cause real problems for those trying to multi-boot. You have to weigh the disadvantages & advantages to losing or keeping them. Keep in mind if you do remove them try and make an image of them first as it's Dell's new policy not to provide windows install cd's to home users any more; which I think is so bogus. 3rd Party boot loaders can help with these issues like Acronis OS selector which comes included with Disk Director a very nice package of tools. There is also V-Com's System Commander which is kept up to date with technology as much as Acronis products have. There is also Boot Loader which comes with Symantec's Partition Manager software formerly Powerquest but they haven't had a new release in years and might have issues working with USB drives.

I'm sure there are freeware products out there as well. You can of course always use LILO & GRUB. However neither one is very user friendly as far as I'm concerned. For really complicated multi-boot systems I recommend and use Acronis (no I don't work for them or own stock in the company . Of course with all this really cool virtualization software / hardware out these days multi-boot might become a thing of the past. Why dual boot when you can have several os'es running concurrently.

[bob]

Thanks for the post - looks very good and I've moved it over to the 'How-To' Forum.

[springChicken]

Thank you for this.

I got it to work for FC5 and a LaCie 100GB external usb drive using a combination of this post and http://simonf.com/usb/.

Following are some details of my experience:

When you boot from FC5 dvd, enter linux expert for the usb drive to show as an install drive option.
After the install same as in this post, i was getting a boot error which turned out to be an issue with initrd also but the fix was not exactly as in this post.

$ fdisk -l
to find out device names

then followed http://simonf.com/usb/#fc3 to mount the boot and sysimage, then mkinitrd as in this post gave me some errors but ended up working.

anyway thanks for the help.

[manos]

First, many thanks to nomadxray for this great post.

I just want to add my experience here. I'm newbie but strong fun of Linux and especially Fedora.

I tried to install it on a HP Pavilion zd8000 laptop. Followed all the above procedure, but when it rebooted for the first time and typed "linux rescue" anaconda didn't find any linux partitions.
I continued to the console but the "chroot /mnt/sysimage" couldn't (obviously) work.

Instead did the following:

mkdir /mnt/usb

mount -t ext3 /dev/sda2 /mnt/usb

My external USB drive was sda and my internal is hda. Always be careful (as nomadxray wrote) not to write on the MBR of your first drive.

Then:

mkdir /mnt/usb/mnt/boot

mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb/mnt/boot

chroot /mnt/usb

su

mkinitrd --preload ehci-hcd --preload usb-storage --preload scsi_mod --preload sd_mod /mnt/boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.img 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5

Check that there is /mnt/boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.img (/mnt before /boot)

And the hard work is done!

One last thing is that, for a reason that I don't understand, grub recognises my external drive as hd0.

So after the installation, I have to correct

root (hd1,0) to root (hd0,0)

And then, everything is working great.

Hope I helped.

[doubled]

for some reason my system doesn't like the mkinitrd, it says it's not a command. but it's working for everyone else. i am going into the linux rescue. and the install went perfectly. everything is right except for the non-working command. any suggestions?

[Jongi]

How would I go about booting of my USB stick. So instead of backing up my grub and boot process to floppy, I want to back it up to the USB stick.

[james419]

I installed FC5 on one of my USB drives using LVM. After some fussing around with the initrd I finally got it to boot using the following:

mkinitrd --preload ehci-hcd --preload usb-storage --preload scsi_mod --preload sd_mod --force-lvm-probe /boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.img 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5

It would not boot until I added the --force-lvm-probe at the after the USB drivers. I tried the --force-lvm-probe before the USB drivers and the boot failed.

The best thing I have found about having FC5 installed on LVM is that it seems more stable than a non LVM install on USB. I had much less problems doing the first update after going to LVM. As yet I have not seen other advantage to using LVM.

[ajamison]

Is it possible to make it so that when the USB drive is not connected the computer boots straight into the OS on the internal drive like windows in my case. Then if you connect the usb drive during restart it asks for which OS u want to boot to so basicaly GRUB is bypassed all together with no USB drive connected

[james419]

ajamison
I installed the linux grub bootloader on the MBR if my USB EXTERNAL drive. I did not in any way change the Windows bootloader on my main drive. Having the linux loader on the EXTERNAL drive allows the computer it boot directly to the internal Windows drive if the USB drive is not pluged in or if its power supply is turned off. My USB drives all have their own external power supplies and on/off switches.

In no case will I ever at this point install the linux bootloader on my internal drives as this leaves them giving boot errors if the external drive is not present and turned on.

[ajamison]

This may be a silly question but if I install fedora to the external USB will it work on any usb capable PC

[james419]

The simple answer is yes, but!!!! The devil is in the details.

Mandriva for instance sells a USB drive that is set up to do just that. I have seen several threads that say that you have work out some method to do a hardware detection on boot up. The longest was several months ago in the PCLinusOS forum that explained how to do it. Since I only use my USB drive on the same computer I do not have a hardware detection problem. I have also seen several threads about installing the iso version of a live cd on a USB hard drive and setting up a presistant /home partition for your data.

Hardware detection would be required for video, sound and even some cpus and have to be changed for each on the fly unlike installing for one computer only.

The buts are the problem.

[ajamison]

Ah that makes since after i think about it but thanks for the info. I have a laptop and a desktop and simply wanted to move back and forth between them without starting from scratch.

If you find an How-To durring your normal surfing of the net on how this would be possible I would love to hear it and would appreciate it if you would be so kind as to post it in this thread and If I find one i will also post it here to help those that may want a similar set-up

[james419]

There is a discussion at: http://pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=1648.0
on ths second page is s brief description about installing a live cd and using it to run your linux install. If you use the Fedora Live Spin bittorrent you may be able to someting like that.

If you two computers have similar HW a regular USB install may work ok. There may be a problem if the video cards or sound card a very different but if they are similar there may be no problem at all. Especially if you do not try to write to an internal drive. If you feel like some adventure give it a try. BUT backup your systems before trying in order to protect your self from grief. Now LOL-- If you have problems I will deny that I gave you any information, advice or encouragement.

As an after thought if you have SATA or RAID systems there may be a very big problem with compatibality with a straight USB install that does not detect and adjust for HW at boot up.

[ajamison]

There is a discussion at: http://pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=1648.0
on ths second page is s brief description about installing a live cd and using it to run your linux install. If you use the Fedora Live Spin bittorrent you may be able to someting like that.

If you two computers have similar HW a regular USB install may work ok. There may be a problem if the video cards or sound card a very different but if they are similar there may be no problem at all. Especially if you do not try to write to an internal drive. If you feel like some adventure give it a try. BUT backup your systems before trying in order to protect your self from grief. Now LOL-- If you have problems I will deny that I gave you any information, advice or encouragement.

As an after thought if you have SATA or RAID systems there may be a very big problem with compatibality with a straight USB install that does not detect and adjust for HW at boot up.

I doubt i will try it since My laptop has very different hw from my desktop. No raid on the desktop but i do have a sata hd in the laptop.