Installing FC6 to USB external hard drive

[ghell]

I have a Twinhead R15B Laptop and a 120GB 2.5" Samsung HM120JC in an external enclosure, connected by USB.

I want to boot windows from my internal hard drive and zod from my external drive. I also want the external drive to remain useful as an external drive (ie have a 20gig partition for zod and the rest just as a normal empty drive). I want the laptop to be bootable when the external drive is not plugged in, so I can't put GRUB on the internal drive's MBR. The installer only gave me an option of installing grub on the internal drives MBR or not at all, so I chose not at all.

The laptop has the following boot sequence:
Removable Drive
Optical Drive
Hard Drive
Network

Nothing can be added or removed from this, but things can be switched around. Connecting the external drive to my main PC gets "Samsung HM120JC" in the boot list, and booting from that says "Grub Loading 1.5 .... error 15 (or error 17, doesnt matter anyway I think) but the laptop remains on "Removable Drive" and when that boot option is selected it tries to boot for a few seconds then falls back to the next item in the sequence.

So I put "GRUB for NTLDR" on my internal drive and modified the windows boot.ini etc according to this guide:
http://marc.herbert.free.fr/linux/wi...ml#grub-for-nt

the fedora installer said:
- sda2 = /boot (102mb)
- sda3 = / (~20gb)
- sda1 = free space used for standard external hard drive stuff (~90gb ntfs))

my menu.lst after installing fedora to the external drive:

title Fedora Core 6
kernel (hd1,0)/vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 root=/dev/sda3
initrd (hd1,0)/initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.img

but this displays:

unmounting old /dev
unmounting old /proc
unmounting old /sys
switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory

it says this for pretty much anything i put in as the root=... appart from sda1 which it gets past there but then complains that it can't find /dev/console

What can I do to get this working? If I have gone totally wrong somewhere how can I get it working from scratch?

[Seve]

Originally Posted by ghell

The installer only gave me an option of installing grub on the internal drives MBR or not at all, so I chose not at all.

Hello:
You are probably missing some essential files as a result of not installing grub.

You will probably have to make an initrd
to do so
boot from the install disc and select linux rescue and at the last prompt
type
chroot /mnt/sysimage
then
mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.img 2.6.18-1.2798


Seve

[ghell]

Are you sure about this? I only found the file names of vmlinuz and initrd to change the menu.lst by plugging the drive into my x86_64 zod pc, which automatically mounted /boot and the 90gb ntfs partition (though I couldnt open the ntfs partition because its a fresh install too) then looking through the mounted /boot partition and seeing the files there... so I'm relatively sure that the files are on the /boot partition, but it seems to have a problem with /

When I had the wrong file names (from that tutorial, which isnt distribution specific) I couldnt get anywhere near this far.

[james419]

For installing and booting FC from USB see the following thread:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=108672

This is a very good instruction of how to do it. You must have some type of bootloader located in the MBR of the external drive and the BIOS set to boot fromt thae external drive before the internal.

[Seve]

Originally Posted by ghell

Are you sure about this?

Hello:
No, I am rarely sure about anything, other than the sun coming up, it was a suggestion and since you have the files included already then we can throw that idea out the window.

Did you use lvm when you installed FC?


Seve

[ghell]

Yes its all logical volumes (i was too lazy/scared to manually do all the partitions so i just made a 20gig partition from windows, then partitioned the rest, deleted the 20gig and did install using the default layout to free space (ie the 20gig unpartitioned space at the start of the drive) from the fedora installer.)

That thread james linked to does kind of state my problem:

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.

but as i said before, it didnt give the option to install to any MBR other than the hda one and also trying to naturally boot from the removable media didnt do anything (probably because it didnt have an option to put it on the removable media's MBR) I have also tried to unallocate the entire drive and just go with installing over the whole drive as a default install just to make things simpler but still no dice..

I don't want to kill windows or even force the laptop to be booted with the external drive always plugged in because I've done it wrong in the end.

[Seve]

Hello:
If you used lvm then I am pretty sure you will need to change your bootloader entry
from

title Fedora Core 6
kernel (hd1,0)/vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 root=/dev/sda3
initrd (hd1,0)/initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.img

to reflect the lvm
this is mine with lvm

PHP Code:

title Fedora Core (2.6.18-1.2798.fc6)
    root (hd1,0)
    kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
    initrd /initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.img 


Seve

[ghell]

That worked great, thanks!

Now I just have to find out how to connect to my WAP PSK network and I'm flying

Thanks again for everything

[Seve]

Hello:
Hey .... good stuff

Glad you got it sorted out.

Seve