Arch Linux

hybrid

Member

Registered: 2007-02-05

Posts: 261

Can't boot Arch from external HDD

Hi, well first off this is not my first Arch Linux installation, I'm using Arch for a little over a year now (coming from slack). But this is my first attempt to have Arch on an external HDD.
Alrighty, the situation is as follows: A rather new computer (supports booting from USB devices and the bios is set to boot from removable devices first) with a built in HDD and an external HDD that's connected to that computer via USB.
What I did: I connected the external HDD to the computer and booted off a 2008.6 Overlord core-CD.
Arch-Live recognized the internal HDD as sda and the external HDD as sdb.
I partitioned the external HDD using cfdisk and ran mkfs.ext3 on it (I didn't use any switches with that).
I started the installer, set my mount points (I should mention I'm not gonna use a swap partition here), installed the packages, well just went through the installation routine and installed grub in the MBR of sdb (the external HDD).
Then I rebooted. And this is what doesn't work: When I boot that computer with the external HDD connected the computer completely hangs right before grub would come up. It freezes completely, ctrl+alt+del doesn't work, I need to use the powerswitch to reboot the computer.
So I put the Arch-CD back in the CD drive trying to boot into my Arch System on the external HDD. So I started typing:
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sdb1 ro vga=773
initrd /boot/kernel26.img

When I try to boot off that grub tells me that there is no such device as hd1,0. The funny thing is, that the auto copmletion in grub works for the kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 but it doesn't for the device /dev/sdb1, in fact even root=/de<tab> returns a "unrecognized string" message.
So this is what I did and I can't boot off my external HDD, neither can I boot into my system on the external hdd from the cdrom.
What am I missing here?

ScriptDevil

Member

From: In Front of My PC

Registered: 2006-04-06

Posts: 253

Re: Can't boot Arch from external HDD

Hey... Have you changed the boot priority in your bios?

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Be yourself, because you are all that you can be

loosec

Member

Registered: 2007-03-08

Posts: 134

Re: Can't boot Arch from external HDD

The harddrive you boot from is in my experience always hd0. Could this mean your external disc is hd2?

Have you tried chainloading from the installer cd to your external disc?