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#1 2010-01-16 21:50:30

willy9
Member
Registered: 2009-04-14
Posts: 56

[SOLVED]Booting from external hard drive

Hi,

My SATA controller seems to be dead, I put my hard drive in an external USB bay. I would like to boot from it so that I still have exactly the same system running, but I'm facing a few issues with grub :

title Arch Linux
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 resume=/dev/sda4 root=/dev/sda2 ro quiet
initrd /boot/kernel26.img

I was surprised to see grub show up right after power on, and starting boot sequence. It then stopped complaining that /dev/sda2 was not found, and I was left in a minimal shell environment.

I tried replacing sda by sdb, since I was this was the new designator for my partitions since they are now mounted in USB, but with no luck.

Does anyone knows what do I need to change in the menu.lst, or elsewhere ?

Thanks in advance !

Last edited by willy9 (2010-01-20 16:17:38)


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#2 2010-01-17 00:09:27

Gusar
Member
Registered: 2009-08-25
Posts: 3,605

Re: [SOLVED]Booting from external hard drive

Add rootdelay=10 to the kernel command.

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#3 2010-01-17 00:17:59

kjon
Member
From: Temuco, Chile
Registered: 2008-04-16
Posts: 398

Re: [SOLVED]Booting from external hard drive

1. you need to rebuild your initramfs with adding the usb hook after 'autodetect'. You might need to chroot into your installation from ubuntu (for example) and then perform the rebuild.

2. add rootdelay as gusar suggested.

3. Hint: Due to you're booting from a external hard drive, I strongly recommend you to set labels to your drives. In this way, you can tell to /etc/fstab which are the proper partitions of your system avoiding the not-so-friendly-for-the-reader uuid string. This will help you to keep away udev messing with your drive's nodes.

in my case, I have a /etc/fstab which looks like this

LABEL="IOMEGA" / ext3 noatime,nodiratime 0 1

for extX filesystems, you can set its label with tune2fs -L label. For other filesystems, RTFM.

Last edited by kjon (2010-01-17 00:19:03)


They say that if you play a Win cd backward you hear satanic messages. That's nothing! 'cause if you play it forwards, it installs windows.

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#4 2010-01-17 09:04:43

willy9
Member
Registered: 2009-04-14
Posts: 56

Re: [SOLVED]Booting from external hard drive

Thanks for the suggestions ! I cannot try them right now, but will report back as soon as I can. smile


Skrooge, a personal finances manager for the Plasma Desktop
http://skrooge.org

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#5 2010-01-20 16:18:35

willy9
Member
Registered: 2009-04-14
Posts: 56

Re: [SOLVED]Booting from external hard drive

The above indications worked perfectly, thanks smile

I never cease to ba amazed by the power of linux, this is pure magic !!!


Skrooge, a personal finances manager for the Plasma Desktop
http://skrooge.org

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