Installing Fedora Core 4 on External USB Drive

[retrocade]

Hi,
I want to install Fedora Core 4 on my external USB drive but I am having problems.
First of all my laptop is a 3.2GHZ P4 with HT, 1GIG DDR RAM, ATI Raedon Mobility M10 128MB and the external drive is a Maxtor 200GB. It is set in the BIOS to boot USB so no problems there.

I have found the solution elsewhere to the following problem but it does not work for me so I thought I would try here in the hope someone could help.

The problem is creating the initrd with a USB driver included so it will boot. I have installed the distro to the drive using expert mode so it would see the USB drive and that went fine but when it came to rebooting and going into the rescue mode and doing the following I get a invalid command.

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/source
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/source/boot
chroot /mnt/source

then I have to do this:

mkinitrd --preload=ehci-hcd --preload=usb-storage --preload=scsi_mod --preload=sd_mod /boot/initrd.img 2.6.11-1.1369smp

That is what I need to do to get it to boot from the USB drive but it wont allow me to even do the first part of this without giving an invalid command.

Now I am new to this but I am more than willing to learn so if anyone can help it would be very much appreciated.

[retrocade]

Anyone help please?

[Roxoff]

yeah - take a look at this thread:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/top...tml&highlight=

I think you only need to edit your /boot/grub/grub.conf to see the new initrd.img file and all should work.

[ichpen]

Sorry to barge into this thread...

Relative newbie, and I attempted the suggestions outlined in the old thread about editing grub.conf. But I still find myself with a GRUB prompts when I attempt to boot FC4 from an 80gig external USB drive.

What I did was to use Partition Magic to partition my drive into 4 linux (ext2) partitions prior to installing FC4. The install went smoothly and I was able to create a new initrd. But still that damn GRUB prompt.

I am able to boot to Live CD images (from USB) otherwise.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

P.S. Grub was loaded onto the MBR of SDA1 during installation.

[w0w00]

dude sorry about last night but im behind a firewall so that s why your dcc cant connect to me.Oh yeah found 2 solutions , one of them is from this website.

Make sure u check the 2nd forum as well before trying anything.
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/topic-29548.html

And here s another one
http://www.benusa.com/linux/boot.htm

Sorry cant help you with any direct answers because i dont have any external usb hdd to try things on.

ok bye bye

[dj_hype]

ok, my bios won't let me boot from a usb drive. so, can i install grub to the mbr of my internal hdd and have it work correctly? heres my setup:
/dev/sda1 - /boot
/dev/sda2 - /
/dev/sda3 - swap
/dev/hda2 - windows boot

i tried to install it to the mbr of the internal hdd but when i boot all it displays is "GRUB" then it stops. anyone have any suggestions?