Can not boot Suse 9.3 from USB hard drive

[kwurl]

I removed my IBM laptop's hard disk (XP) and replaced it with a brand new 80Gb disk and successfully loaded Suse 9.3 on to this hard disk. When I boot up, everything works great.

Now, I want to take the Suse hard disk and remove it from the internal disk bay and make it a USB hard disk so I can put my Windows XP hard disk back and control the boot up process via BIOS (boot from USB if installed, otherwise, boot from the XP hard disk.)

In order to prepare the USB hard disk, I peformed the following:
0. Plug in harddrive as USB; boot from Suse CD
1. fdisk -l to display the partitions (I have only swap /dev/sda1 and root /dev/sda2)
2. mkdir /mnt/sysimage
3. mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/sysimage
4. chroot /mnt/sysimage
5. edit /etc/sysconfig/kernel to modify the INTRD_MODULES to specify "reiserfs ehci-hcd ohci-hcd uhci-hcd usb-storage sd_mod"
6. mount -tproc none /proc
7. mkinitrd
8. shutdown -h now

When I attempt to reboot using the USB Linux harddrive, I get "No root device found; exiting to /bin/sh" and "sh: can't access tty; job control turned off".

Can anyone assist me in getting this Suse to boot from the USB hard disk ?

[devils casper]

hi kwurl !

Welcome to the LinuxForums. post then contents of device.map and menu.lst files.

less /boot/grub/menu.lst
less /boot/grub/device.map

Casper

[kwurl]

Well, when I have the unbootable USB Harddrive, I have only a "$" prompt and no access to any file systems.

So, I'll reboot from the CD and go into rescue mode and mount my root file system

device.map
(hd0) /dev/hda

menu.lst
color white/blue black/light-gray
default 0
timeout 8
gfxmenu (hd0,1)/boot/message
title Linux
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz root-/dev/hda2 vga-0x314 selinux=0 splash=silent resume=/dev/hda1 elevator=cfg showopts
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd
title Failsafe
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off vga=normal noreume selinux=0 barrier=off nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 3
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd

[devils casper]

i am a bit confused. according to device.map file, your Harddisk is IDE PATA

device.map
(hd0) /dev/hda

but you wrote that its SATA.

1. fdisk -l to display the partitions (I have only swap /dev/sda1 and root /dev/sda2)
2. mkdir /mnt/sysimage
3. mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/sysimage

which harddisk do you have?




Casper

[kwurl]

Good catch. Maybe that's why I can't boot ?
As mentioned, I started out with this hard disk as internal IDE and installed Linux. Then, I removed the hard disk, put into a USB tray and plugged it into my computer...so, essentially, I started out with this disk as an IDE and now want to boot from it as a USB. How can I use the Linux already loaded on this hard drive and convert it to a USB bootable hard disk ? Thanks.

[devils casper]

boot up from installation CD, enter in rescue mode and mount root file system
edit device.map and menu.lst files.

nano /boot/grub/device.map
nano /boot/grub/menu.lst

if nano doesn't work, use pico or vi.

contents of device.map file

(hd0) /dev/sda

menu.lst file

color white/blue black/light-gray
default 0
timeout 8
gfxmenu (hd0,1)/boot/message
title Linux
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz root-/dev/sda2 vga-0x314 selinux=0 splash=silent resume=/dev/sda1 elevator=cfg showopts
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd
title Failsafe
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2 showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off vga=normal noreume selinux=0 barrier=off nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 3
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd

save files and reboot.. check if it works...





casper

[kwurl]

Casper. thanks. yeah, that worked. My system is now booting from the USB drive, and I learned a bit about drive naming. Thanks.

[devils casper]

ahaa ! i am glad i could help you.






Casper