USB Boot?

[fvs]

Hi guys.
I've installed ETCH in my USB hard disk. During the installation I had no problem it all. But, I just can't start Etch from my USB HD. My motherboard supports boot from USB HD, however, it don't boot up, I get error message 18?
Looking in the internet I've tried to do this: Rescuegui and it wont help.
My motherboard supports usb, and my bios is set to boot my extrnal hard drive?
Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
__________________
fvs

[devils casper]

Does other OS installed in Internal Disk boot up properly? Where did you install GRUB?
Boot up in rescue mode and post the contents of /boot/grub/menu.lst file ( root and kernel lines only ) and output of fdisk -l command.

[Roxoff]

Oh, where to start...

Firstly this is ETCH? So it's Debian, yes? You do realise this is the RedHat/Fedora bit of the forums, doncha? I know absolutely nothing about doing this on Debian, but I've done it with Fedora before (actually it was FC4, I believe). It's just that putting it here means the Debian experts may not see it (apart from Casper, who is omnipotent...)

You probably need to install the USB drivers in your initrd file. This is probably an identical process to the one used in Fedora, so you might want to check out the little how-to I put together at the time. This continues to work on FC5 and 6, so I have no doubts that the process continues to be valid.

[devils casper]

Firstly this is ETCH? So it's Debian, yes? You do realise this is the RedHat/Fedora bit of the forums, doncha? I know absolutely nothing about doing this on Debian, but I've done it with Fedora before (actually it was FC4, I believe). It's just that putting it here means the Debian experts may not see it (apart from Casper, who is omnipotent...)

I didn't notice. Thanx for pointing it out.
I am moving this thread to Debian Forum.

[fvs]

I have Fedora 7 on this USB 120 gig external hard drive and I want to have Debian Etch on the second partition on this drive, I tried to install etch first on hd0 and fedora on the second partition but it didn't work. Fedora seems to want the whole drive for it self, However it does work well that way, Debian will in\stall but not boot either only or partitioned?

[devils casper]

Post the partition structure of External HD. Execute fdisk -l command.

[fvs]

casper, I reinstalled Fedora7 and it took the whole disk, I only have Fedora 7 as you can see,
[root@localhost ~]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 14 14593 117113850 8e Linux LVM
[root@localhost ~]#

I would have to repartition it once more or can I resize the sda2 LVM to install debian again?

[devils casper]

Its not possible to shrink LVM easily. Most of partition managers including GParted and Parted Magic do not support LVMs.
You have to reinstall Fedora.
Create two partitions only. One for Fedora and Other for Debian. You can leave free space for sharing data between two.

[fvs]

Which distro first? Debian on sda1, skip sda2 , Fedora 7 on sda3 and swap on sda4 ? How should I portion them? Think that will work?

[devils casper]

You can use any Partition Manager like GParted or Parted Magic to create partitions. I forgot about SWAP partition.
Create sda1 for Fedora /, sda2 for SWAP and sda3 for Debian /.
Install Fedora in sda1. Install Debian in sda3 and install Debian's GRUB in boot sector of sda3.
After Debian's installation, Boot up Fedora and add this code in its /boot/grub/grub.conf file

title Debian 
     rootnoverify (hd0,2)
     chainloader +1