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Booting from external USB Harddrive ?
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thomasmue
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Joined: 02 Oct 2003
Posts: 73
Location: MTK,OF,WAK

PostPosted: Sun Mar 27, 2005 12:12 pm    Post subject: Booting from external USB Harddrive ? Reply with quote

Hi,

because I want to use my office notebook for playing with gentoo, I tried to boot from USB. But no success.

The notebook is a DELL Lattitude D505. The BIOS supports booting from external USB devices.

The external USB Drive is a 2.5" Harddrive with a Samsung MP8004H.

The partition Layout is:

partition 1: primary 20 GB FAT32
partiton 2: primary 1 GB Linux with ext3 filesystem
partition 5: extended 20 GB Linux with ext3 filesystem
partition 6: extended 1 GB swap
parition 7: 35 GB Linux unused.

I installed gentoo with a knoppix cd and installed grub.
I included USB and USB Mass Storage support in the kernel.

When I try to boot, I can see my grub menu, and grub starts the kernel. But then I get a message:
VFS: can't find /dev/sda5

after that I see a message, that the USB drive is recognzed.

Any ideas ? Thanks.

Thomas
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NeddySeagoon
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Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54028
Location: 56N 3W

PostPosted: Sun Mar 27, 2005 12:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

thomasmue,

You need a special kernel that initialises the USB system before it attempts to mount the root filesystem, which is not the normal course of events.
Its discussed on the forums an I recall a patch to make it work too.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
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