OpenSuse on External USB Drive

[hovh03]

After I was able to install OpenSuse on an external USB drive, I keep seeing the following message when booting up:

Could not find /dev/disk/by-id/USB-WD.....
Do you want to fall back to .. [Y/n]

Press enter, I see this message:

Waiting for device /dev/disk/by-id/USB-WD... to appear.

Then sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. If it doesn't, it falls to a command line that I don't know what to do with it (maybe mount and continue somehow?)
One time, I pull the USB plug out and plug back in and it works.

This is strange, since I install the Grub and everything on this USB, leaving the laptop untouched, so why it works so far, was able to read abunch of stuff out of the same drive, and then stuck there?

This is already pass the Grub, and it runs for a while.

This is OpenSuse 11, 32 bit edition.

[Jonathan183]

Can you post the output of /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab. Also can you identify which part is failing to be found.

Ed: can you also post the output of

su
fdisk -l

and have you tried anything from here?

[hovh03]

There are 2 hard drives on the computer, and then the USB drive. The USB drives has 4 partitions. 1: boot, 2: swap, 3: home, 4th: NTFS. The partition that it complains about is the boot partition (part1). The strange thing is that it's been reading from this partition since the beginning and then complain about it.

Here's the fstab:

/dev/disk/by-id/usb-WD_3200BEV_External_57442D575845333038453235323839-0:0-part2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/usb-WD_3200BEV_External_57442D575845333038453235323839-0:0-part1 / ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/disk/by-id/usb-WD_3200BEV_External_57442D575845333038453235323839-0:0-part3 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0

And here is the fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xc5fcbd5f

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 12843 103161366 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 12844 14593 14056875 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xcd377c98

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 14593 117218241 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdc: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x8f9c798a

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 1 3917 31463271 83 Linux
/dev/sdc2 3918 4440 4200997+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdc3 4441 13578 73400985 83 Linux
/dev/sdc4 13579 38913 203503387+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

Here is: menu.list

default 0
timeout 8
gfxmenu (hd0,0)/boot/message

title openSUSE 11.0 - 2.6.25.5-1.1
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.25.5-1.1-pae root=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-WD_3200BEV_External_57442D575845333038453235323839-0:0-part1 resume=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-WD_3200BEV_External_57442D575845333038453235323839-0:0-part1 splash=silent showopts vga=0x314
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.25.5-1.1-pae


I followed that document on these parts when doing the installation:

grub-install /dev/sdc1

and exchange hd0 with hd1

Please note that most of the time, the computer would run. For example right now, I am typing on it.

[hovh03]

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