External USB drive installation (Newbie question)

[Pani]

Hi,
I'm a newbie to Linux, but managed to install Red Hat 8.0 on a USB external drive. Up to this, everything worked great. When I try rebooting, it goes properly through GRUB, but gets to the point where it gives me error messages which are:

"VFS: Cannot open root device "LABEL=/"or 00:00
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 00:00"

I checked grub.conf and LABEL is being defined as the root directory which I believe is /dev/sda5
Is it right to say that the external drive is not being mounted properly by the kernel and how do I resolve this ? Booting from a floppy first works fine.

I would appreciate any help !!

[Dolda2000]

The thing is that the standard distribution kernels don't have built=in support for USB; it has to be loaded from a module (and since the modules are on your USB hard drive, it could be a bit hard...). So basically, you have two choices: either compile a new kernel with built-in USB support, or use an initrd with the modules. The easiest way to create an initrd is probably to use the mkinitrd program. I've never used that myself, though, but check its manpage for more info.