Arch Linux

nobody44

Member

Registered: 2011-08-25

Posts: 29

[SOLVED] installing arch linux on an external hard drive

Hi,
I am trying to install Arch Linux on an external hard drive. I installed and configured the system using my desktop arch linux system. No problems so far. The grub installation was successful as well and I rebuild the grub.cfg using grub-mkconfig. I replaced all hdx with hd0 as suggested here. Both my fstab and my grub.cfg use UUIDs.

When I try to boot from the external hard drive, grub appears and the kernel is loaded. After that it says, that the root device can not be found. In the emergency shell I tried to find the device manually, but I could not find it.

`ls /dev/` lists both my internal hard drives (I can tell by the number of partitions), but not the external hard drive from where it has loaded the kernel.

What am I doing wrong?

Thank you!

nobody44

/edit: solved by using the fallback image

Last edited by nobody44 (2013-09-03 17:38:59)

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,548

Website

Re: [SOLVED] installing arch linux on an external hard drive

Can you post your mkinitcpio.conf?  What filesystem(s) do you use on the partitions?

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"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

nobody44

Member

Registered: 2011-08-25

Posts: 29

Re: [SOLVED] installing arch linux on an external hard drive

I did not change the mkinitcpio.conf, just removed the comments for the forum:

MODULES=""
BINARIES=""
FILES=""
HOOKS="base udev autodetect modconf block filesystems keyboard fsck"

Appearently it does work on my desktop machine. I get the error described above on my notebook (Acer Aspire V3 772g, Haswell Intel CPU).

Filesystems: ext4 on both partitions ('/' and '/boot')

Hope that helps

nobody44

Last edited by nobody44 (2013-09-03 10:41:01)

nobody44

Member

Registered: 2011-08-25

Posts: 29

Re: [SOLVED] installing arch linux on an external hard drive

Solved by vodik from IRC:

The default image is tailored for the machine the kernel was built on, so the notebook needed more modules in order to work.
A simple solution is: load the fallback image as default

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: [SOLVED] installing arch linux on an external hard drive

If this drive is intended to be used on different machines, maybe you should eliminate the creation of the standard initramfs altogether.  The only difference between the regular mkinitpcio image and the fallback on is the presence of the 'autodetect' hook.  So it seems rather pointless to have the one with the autodetect hook in place if it is not going to be for the same machine every time.

So edit the mkinitpcio.conf and take out the 'autodetect' from the HOOKS line.  Then edit /etc/mkinitpcio.d/linux.preset, and remove the 'fallback' from the PRESETS array.  Then it will build only one initramfs which will be the same as building the fallback (but named the normal initramfs-linux.img).  So you will need to point your bootloader back to that.

Of course, this is totally optional, and wouldn't hurt anything if yo uchose not to do this.  But I just see no point to using the (admittedly small) space, processor, time, etc. to build an unnecessary, and entirely unused, image.

nobody44

Member

Registered: 2011-08-25

Posts: 29

Re: [SOLVED] installing arch linux on an external hard drive

Thanks for the hint. Done and works perfectly.