Hi everybody, I am having seriouy problem installing Suse 9.2(64-bit version). I have an external hard drive(a Seagate Barracuda 160 GB, 7200 RPM IDE HD put in a Nexstar USB hard dtive enclosure) connected to the USB port of my laptop(an AMD 64 system). My internal HD is not big enough, so this is why I am installing linux on an external HD. The problem is as follows : Once booted from the CD/DVD ROM drive, the suse 9.2 installation DVD gets stuck at a point showing the message "init.14 soft raid"; it gets stuck there forever. I have no RAID options on my laptop. If I disconnect the external HD, then there is no problem and Yast starts running immediately. I thought that since the external HD is not partitioned(I read it somewhere in linuxquestions.org forum), the installation CD can not read it. After I partitioned it from a linux environment running gentoo(80 GB with win95 FAT32 and 80GB with linux), I had the same problem. The installation gets stuck exactly at the same point. Next, I tried gentoo 2004.3 live CD; same thing here. It gets stuck at autoconfiguring the hardware section. Since external USB device appears as a SCSI emulated device to a linux system, I thought it's better to pass the 'noapic' option while booting. This time the gentoo live CD booted without hitch and the external HD was located at a strange place : /dev/ud/apart1 and /dev/ud/a/part2(I had two partitions). Encouraged with it, I booted the suse 9.2 DVD with 'noapic' option. This time I had no problem and Yast's graphical environment started quickly. But I found that the external disc is not detected. The only option I am left with is to partition my internal HD. This may have to do with the kernel. It loads the external HD as a removable USB device and apparently I can not install the OS there. Any help will be greatly appreciated. I spent the whole morning without any result. Thanks Jaydeep