Installing Suse 10 to External USB Drive...

[d3StR0Y3r]

I'm having trouble installing Suse 10 on a 320gb external USB Western Digital hd. It has three partitions, a 2 gb linux swap partition, a 50 gb linux home partition, and a 268gb Windows NTFS partition.

I'm certain that my laptop is capable of booting usb devices and the Suse installer recognizes the drive but after Suse restarts after it has copied all the files from CD 1, the drive is nowhere to be found.

I have tried using the Suse rescue system, but it prompts me for a username and password I have never configured because the installer never actually completed. Whenever I try booting from the hard disk, the command shell opens and the last four lines are as follows:

Loading fan
Waiting for device /dev/sda5 to appear: ... resume device /dev/sda5 not found (ignoring)
Loading reiserfs
Waiting for device /dev/sda6 to appear: ... not found -- exiting to /bin/sh

Any help would be extremely appreciated. Thanx in advance.

[abbas attarwala]

before the kernel boots up, u have to load the usb drivers.

[oldman]

d3StROY3r

Something looks funny. With only 3 partitions on your drive you should only have sda1, sda2 and sda3 not sda5. This would indicate that there are more than 3 partitions. Since I normally use a livecd linux distro such as Knoppix or PCLinuxOS I can not tell you how to correct this via the command line editors- may be some good linux elf could step in and help.I need to use the CLI more!!!!

EDIT: I found a VI manual at:

http://www.cs.fsu.edu/general/vimanual.html


After sorting out the partitions there is a very good description of installing SUSE 10 on a USB drive at:

http://forums.devarticles.com/the-li...rive-6250.html

The best and most complete item to use is the response #4 written by punkrawkpat. It is his first entry in this discussion.


It is necessary to force the initrd to install the USB drivers before any others.
punkrawkpat's solution is the correst one for SUSE 10. Other distros will require other methods as can be seen by the problems others in this thread are having.

I have SUSE 10 on a 15GB USB drive, On a second USB drive I have Fedora Core 4, Mandriva 2006, PCLinuxOS .92, Mepis 3.4-3 and FoX.

abbas

Did you get your installation finished and working?

Jim

[d3StR0Y3r]

Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to get Suse to boot on the external disk. I have tried several different boot parameters to force Suse to load the usb drivers but to no avail. This is what I tried:

INITRD_MODULES="reiserfs ehci-hcd ohci-hcd uhci-hcd usb-storage sd_mod"

&

INITRD_MODULES="ehci-hcd ohci-hcd uhci-hcd sd_mod usb-storage"

I also tried moving my linux partitions to the beginning of the drive since supposably partitions past sector 1024 are unbootable. So, now these partitions show up as sda2 and sda3, but it still does not work.

When Suse exits to the shell after it can't find the drives, I have tried to mount them manually, but it still can't find them. As for editing the /etc/sysconfig/kernel goes, I can't acess the file, and VI doesn't exist on the commandline.

Any ideas?

[oldman]

Here goes- I will try to describe the SUSE installation I made tonight to check everything.

After installation and on first boot do the following

1. Turn on your USB drive. Place the #1 install CD in the tray. Boot.
When the select page comes up scroll down to RESCUE MODE and select it.
The loading will start and procede to a prompt:

password: root <-- put this in and ENTER

you will get

Rescue:~# <-- this is your prompt

2.Enter as follows (each line is a seperate prompt so finish the line with a CR)
ENTER = CR

mkdir /mnt/suse
mount /dev/sdax /mnt/suse
chroot /mnt/suse

3.You are now at the root of the installed SUSE. Now to edit the first file with vi.

vi /etc/sysconfig/kernel

With this command the kernel file will be displayed.

scroll down to the line INITRD_MODULES=""

Go to the last item in the line and add the following list of items allowing 1 space between then on the same line- do not use a CR.

ehci-hcd ohci-hcd uhci-hcd sd_mod usb-storage

make sure this addition in in the quotes("")

to exit vi hit ESC then use the following to save the file

:wq <-- one of the save and quite codes for vi

4. Now generate the new initrd with the following commands

mount -tproc none /proc

mkinitrd

After this you will get some lines of read out- make a note of the two lines that will have the kernel numbers
vmlinuz-<data> and initrd-<data> the data will be in the form of 2.6.13-8-default or some such. This is needed for the next step.

5. Now use vi to edit the following file

vi /boot/grub/menu.lst

Look for a series of lines similar to the following and edit to include the above saved data for all SUSE listings.

title SUSE 10
kernel(hd0,X)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.13-8-default ro etc
initrd (hd0,X)/boot/initrd-2.6.13-8-default

note 0 is your drive letter and X is parition number - 1
ie sda1 = hd0,0


If it still does not boot it may be necessary to do some more editing but lets get this far for now.

exit and reboot.

I will watch this thread to see how you make out.

Jim

[d3StR0Y3r]

I now have Suse 10 up and running and am currently posting this response from it. After I knew what the default login was for the rescue shell I was able to set the rest up.

You were extremely helpful during this whole process and I hope more people will be able to use this thread to solve their own USB booting issues. Thanx a lot!

[oldman]

I am pleased you now have SUSE up and running. Helping you helped me also. I had to find out the password for the RESCUE MODE as well as having to figure out how to use vi. In th past I have used a livecd where I could work with a gui interface which for and old Windows user is easier.

Now that you have SUSE running have some fun!

Jim

[Boise Chris]

I have Ubuntu working on A Ext. USB Drive now. I am looking forward to installing Suse 10 in place of it. I ran across this post and saved it in my Bookmarks.

Thank You for having this online.

Chris.

[german mike]

I have Ubuntu working on A Ext. USB Drive now. I am looking forward to installing Suse 10 in place of it. I ran across this post and saved it in my Bookmarks.

Thank You for having this online.

Chris.

Chris,
I`m getting next year a laptop and OLDMAN thank you for the tips ,I will save to on bookmarks.

[Des-iree]

excellent advice - OLDMAN
i spent 3 day trying to boot from external drive
your post for 2-24-06 did the trick
thank you so much