Booting from USB without mobo support

Surrender · 2008-12-20 02:57:29

I've installed Arch on a usb drive but my ancient hardware doesn't appear to support booting from usb devices. Is there a way to make this work? I have Debian on an internal drive. Is there some way to leverage Debian to boot Arch?

Statix · 2008-12-20 03:37:44

I would think with debian installed on your internal drive you should just be able to set up grub to boot your usb just as if it were an internal drive.

Just make an entry for Arch in grub's /boot/grub/menu.lst and use (hd1,0) as your root. (This is assuming you only have one hd in your computer. Adjust appropriately for the drive number of your usb drive.)

Last edited by Statix (2008-12-20 03:40:44)

Surrender · 2008-12-20 04:12:33

Statix wrote:

I would think with debian installed on your internal drive you should just be able to set up grub to boot your usb just as if it were an internal drive.
Just make an entry for Arch in grub's /boot/grub/menu.lst and use (hd1,0) as your root. (This is assuming you only have one hd in your computer. Adjust appropriately for the drive number of your usb drive.)

Thanks for the reply.:)

I'm getting grub error 21 "Disk does not exist":

Here is my entry in Debian's menu.lst:

title Arch Linux
root (hd2,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/94e91a91-9cc2-401b-af27-09c24ff8037d ro
initrd /boot/kernel26.img
savedefault
boot

I also tried (hd1,0) and I get the same error.

Statix · 2008-12-20 07:08:53

Hmm now that I think about it, I can see why it wouldn't work. Your bios probably won't detect the usb devices so grub won't see them, so it'll have to be something after the kernel loads to support usb.

Ahh... not sure where to go from here, sorry.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-12-20 02:57:29

Booting from USB without mobo support

#2 2008-12-20 03:37:44

Re: Booting from USB without mobo support

#3 2008-12-20 04:12:33

Re: Booting from USB without mobo support

#4 2008-12-20 07:08:53

Re: Booting from USB without mobo support

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