Arch Linux

ar2k7

Member

Registered: 2006-10-14

Posts: 27

External usb harddrive problem

I'm trying to setup this laptop with an external usb harddrive for someone. Want to have the root partition / filesystem on the external drive. The problem is bios won't boot usb, so was trying to work around this by moving grub and the boot partition onto the internal bootable drive. So added usb-storage to the modules line and usb to the hooks line in mkinitcpio.conf and regenerated things. But it won't boot into it. Any ideas what to add to the kernel image to make this happen? Thanks!

Some hand written (not complete) screen output...

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usbcore: registered new interface driver usbfs
usbcore: registered new interface driver hub
usbcore: registered new device driver hub
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
USB Mass Storage support registered.
:: Running Hook [udev]
:: Loading udev...
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usb 4-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and adress 2
usb 4-3: configuration 01 chosen from 1 choice
scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
done
:: Running Hook [usb]
:: Running Hook [encrypt]
device-mapper: ioctl: 4.10.0-ioctl (2006-09-14) initialized: dm-devel@redhat....
:: Running Hook [filesystems]
:: Loading root filesystem module...-e
Attempting to create root device '/dev/sda3'
waiting for devices to settle...scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access    Master....
SCSI: device sda: 490234752 512-byte hdwr sectors (251000 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
 sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4
sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sda
done.
/bin/mknod "/dev/sda3" b 8 3
   luks
:: Initramfs Completed - control passing to kinit
IP-Config: no devices to configure
Waiting 0 s before mounting root device...
kinit: Cannot open root device sda3(8,3)
kinit: Init not found!
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
  <4>atkbd.c: Spurious ACK on isa   . Some program might be trying access hardware directly.
atkbd.c: Spurious ACK on isa   . Some program might be trying access hardware directly.
atkbd.c: Spurious ACK on isa   . Some program might be trying access hardware directly.
atkbd.c: Spurious ACK on isa   . Some program might be trying access hardware directly.
atkbd.c: Spurious ACK on isa   . Some program might be trying access hardware directly.
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sandstorm

Member

From: Zurich [CH] & Mannheim [DE]

Registered: 2005-08-13

Posts: 169

Re: External usb harddrive problem

I had to add sd_mod and sata_nv into the /etc/mkinitcpio.conf before the usb-storage entry to work. Of course you need to go through the mkinitcpio process afterwards to build your kernel26.img again: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mkinitcpio#Manually

MODULES="sd_mod sata_nv usb-storage dm-mod ext2 ext3"

It helped in my case, hope it helps in your case.

Martin