On Thursday 27 September 2007 12:13:53 pm Nick Zentena wrote:

On Thursday 27 September 2007 08:01, Nick Zentena wrote:

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This may be stupid but a question it is.

What if any problems will I have with 10.3 installed on an external USB drive? Windows is on the laptop internal drive. I guess grub will be installed to that. Will it handle booting to the external? Will it gracefully handle the times the external won't be plugged in? I guess it'll be slower then an internal drive.

To follow up on my own question.

I bought the drive and am currently installing 10.3 RC1. The install software found the drive. I decided to change the drive layout a bit but other then that it seems to be going nicely. Crossing my fingers.

Nick

Set BIOS boot sequence CD, USB, HD. Install grub on USB drive. When USB is not present it will boot from CD or HD. When USB is present it will boot CD or USB, with grub option to boot Windows. If you put grub on HD with /boot directory on USB you can't boot without USB drive. -- Regards, Rajko. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Friday 28 September 2007 03:50:24 pm Nick Zentena wrote:

On Thursday 27 September 2007 19:31, Rajko M. wrote:

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Set BIOS boot sequence CD, USB, HD. Install grub on USB drive.

When USB is not present it will boot from CD or HD. When USB is present it will boot CD or USB, with grub option to boot Windows.

If you put grub on HD with /boot directory on USB you can't boot without USB drive.

I'm not sure about the last part here. Are you saying to stick /boot on the internal? Or not to put grub on the USB?

Right now everything works with the USB on. Turn it off and I get a grub error 21.

Yeah. I said to install all, including grub, on USB stick and change only BIOS boot sequence to include USB before HD. That way when you take USB out, computer will boot from hard disk as before. From (Konqueror) info:grub/Stage2 errors 21 : Selected disk does not exist it seems that you have stage2 that is in /boot/grub on hard disk. Otherwise if there would be only grub stage1 (that goes in MBR) error. See (again in Konqueror) info:/grub/Stage1 errors. Would you mind to post output of: fdisk -l with and without USB stick. -- Regards, Rajko. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Saturday 29 September 2007 07:19, Nick Zentena wrote:

On Friday 28 September 2007 19:59, Rajko M. wrote:

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Yeah.

I said to install all, including grub, on USB stick and change only BIOS boot sequence to include USB before HD. That way when you take USB out, computer will boot from hard disk as before.

I was afraid you say that. With 10.3 RC1 grub either seems to work but when I reboot I get the error 21. Or if I do the grub from the rescue disk I get an error message claiming the disk doesn't exist.

Grub is happy to write to the internal disk.

I'll try again later today and post the fdisk output.

Nick

I give up. During installs I get a silent failure when trying to put grub on the USB drive. If I try doing it from the rescue system it can't find the drive and gives me an error. When 10.3 is fully released I'll try again. Nick -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Razi Khaja wrote:

You need to put the boot loader and boot partition on the internal hard disk (you can specify this during install ... specifically when you format the boot partition and install the grub boot loader). The remainder of your opensuse OS partitions will live on the external usb disk or memory stick. I managed to get this to work on an old IBM T20 laptop that did not support boot from USB where the boot partition lived on the internal disk (unfortunately that system died).

Alternatively you could put the boot partition on a CDR. The CDR option is a little more complicated. I havent tried this, so my guess is that you will have to copy the boot partition to the CDR and possibly modify /boot/grub/menu.lst passing kernel parameters to appropriately reference the location of /root and swap.

See http://en.opensuse.org/Installing_SuSE_on_External_USB_Drive for more ideas

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=2903697 also has some details.

On 9/30/07, Nick Zentena wrote:

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On Saturday 29 September 2007 07:19, Nick Zentena wrote:

...

On Friday 28 September 2007 19:59, Rajko M. wrote:

...

Yeah.

I said to install all, including grub, on USB stick and change only BIOS boot sequence to include USB before HD. That way when you take USB out, computer will boot from hard disk as before.

I was afraid you say that. With 10.3 RC1 grub either seems to work but when I reboot I get the error 21. Or if I do the grub from the rescue disk I get an error message claiming the disk doesn't exist.

Grub is happy to write to the internal disk.

I'll try again later today and post the fdisk output.

Nick

I give up.

During installs I get a silent failure when trying to put grub on the USB drive.

If I try doing it from the rescue system it can't find the drive and gives me an error.

When 10.3 is fully released I'll try again.

Nick -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

JRR wrote;

I built a special machine to overcome these problems. It uses an Intel D875PBZ motherboard. (ATX / Pentium 4 CPU 478 pin / 800 Mhz FSB) This motherboard has 2 SATA connectors, 2 ATA-100 connectors, and a flopppy connector. Take the primary ATA / EIDE connector and make your master drive an Iomega Zip-250, slave Seagate Travan 4 tape. Take the secondary ATA / EIDE and make the CD-ROM // DVD combo drive master and DVD +-RW drive slave. Use the two SATA connectors for a RAID 0 array.... What does this do? The RAID loads last!!! So set the emulation for the Zip 250 drive to hard disk NOT removable disk. Now you can boot ANYTHING that will fit on 250 MB..... Take out the Zip disk and the system will boot the RAID..... :-) Somebody should try this trick on a newer motherboard and a larger Zip disk.... Jrr -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org