On Thu, 13 Jan 2011 09:44:30 -0800, Marc Chamberlin wrote:

This leads me to believe that the BIOS does understand about external USB hard drives that are plugged in to some USB port on the laptop.

Right so far.

(and I assume also eSata drives plugged in to a USB/eSata port)

And here you err. These are two electrically different ports that just happen to share one connection. To the machine these are different ports so a BIOS option for external USB will most certainly not mean a drive connected as eSATA. These combined ports are mostly meant for drives that connect as eSATA but draw their power from the USB bus as the eSATA designers totally forgot about that. My experience shows that eSATA drives are enumerated like internal drives so you still have to find out the device that gets assigned to the disk.

devices listed... To my untrained eyes, that seems inconsistent as I had the USB/eSata hard drive plugged in when I rebooted the laptop and brought up the BIOS menu...

You have booted the machine with the drive plugged in? Otherwise you will have to manually initiate a bus scan to get the drive discovered. Philipp -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On 1/14/2011 2:00 AM, Dave Howorth wrote:

Philipp Thomas wrote:

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(and I assume also eSata drives plugged in to a USB/eSata port) And here you err. These are two electrically different ports that just happen to share one connection. To the machine these are different

On Thu, 13 Jan 2011 09:44:30 -0800, Marc Chamberlin wrote: ports so a BIOS option for external USB will most certainly not mean a drive connected as eSATA. These combined ports are mostly meant for drives that connect as eSATA but draw their power from the USB bus as the eSATA designers totally forgot about that.

My experience shows that eSATA drives are enumerated like internal drives so you still have to find out the device that gets assigned to the disk. Philipp has said much more clearly what I meant :)

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The BIOS is configure so that the boot sequence is first from a CD/DVD drive, then from a USB drive, then from the internal hard drive. In my limited experience, when there is a BIOS choice of "internal hard drive" or the like, then there is a separate BIOS choice for the order in which the internal disks are to be considered, perhaps buried on a different page. It seems likely that your esata port is somewhere in

In addition Marc wrote: that menu, and is either not selected or is selected after your internal disk.

Cheers, Dave Thanks everyone for all the advice and help offers! Much appreciated... I have managed to get openSuSE11.3 installed on my external eSata drive and thought I would report back with some info I have found out....

First of all, apologies for not understanding the difference between eSata and USB, the port on my laptop is a dual port for both, and I had no idea as to the reasons why... Thanks Philip for enlightening me, never would have thought that the designers of eSata would have screwed up an not supplied power!!! That is plain bizarre.... Second, the menus and procedures supplied with the installation disk, for setting up GRUB and bootloaders, are IMHO, extremely difficult to grok and understand. For a non-expert, such as myself, I feel extremely uncomfortable using these menus as they simply do not guide me in a way that I feel safe. There are, for example, various options selectable by checkboxes (not toggles that prevent illegal combinations) of where to install the boot loaders - MBR, Root partition, Boot Partition, yada yada and underneath this one must establish drive order without any real model being presented as to what the effects of all these choices will be. One can check more than one option or even all of em!! Dunno what would happen if I did and was too afraid to find out! I kinda think a rework with a more graphical presentation showing pictorially just what is going to get installed where would be far more understandable, if anyone cares to improve this... Something akin to what most disk partitioning tools do... That said, I finally managed to come across an old post on setting up on a dual boot system that made a lot of sense and was EASY to follow. Simply remove the internal drive from the laptop entirely! No way one can screw up it's MBR or anything else on it then. And install to the external hard drive as normally done using the defaults... One can fix up the boot menu later to make it dual boot and not have to worry about doing things wrong, or use those difficult to understand menus! I LIKE nice safe easy solutions!!!! Third, and I should think this will make a LOT of Linux users hopping mad, it does me! After I got openSuSE installed on my external eSata drive, I discovered that the ONLY way for me to boot it is to catch, during the initial power on sequence, the F12 function key prompt and activate the Boot disk selection menu that comes with my Dell Vostro 3700 laptop. (this is done at the same time one would press the F2 function key to bring up the BIOS system menu.) The BIOS itself does NOT support using an eSata drive as an option in it's boot priority menu, and as pointed out to me, USB is NOT the same as eSata, so selecting a high priority for USB disk drives will not work.) I talked to a Dell support person, who like me was initially surprised that the BIOS does not support the eSata drive as a bootable disk. He went off and did some research on it and came back with a reason which Linux users are gonna "love"!!! Apparently Microsoft has forced Dell into a license agreement and I will quote him - "Not booting from the e sata is a Microsoft imposed limitation to prevent licensing conflicts." I have not researched this further but if true then my reaction is HUMP! If anyone knows anything about such a restriction, I would be curious as to why it has not been challenged... No where on Dells website, or in their specs was I told (or should say - could find information) about this when I bought my laptop from them, and I would guess/think this restriction from Microsoft would violate fair usage laws. It should make eSata disk drive manufactures hopping mad also.. So IMHO Microsoft has apparently thrown yet another hurdle against Linux... Perhaps this should be noted on openSuSE's website and in the installation instructions? Marc Chamberlin.... -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Thu, 2011-01-13 at 09:44 -0800, Marc Chamberlin wrote:

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On 1/13/2011 8:55 AM, Dave Howorth wrote:

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Marc Chamberlin wrote:

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So, how do I configure GRUB to find the USB/eSata drive? (I am using a dual USB/eSata port on my laptop, and the USB/eSata drive is using the eSata interface. The BIOS is configure so that the boot sequence is first from a CD/DVD drive, then from a USB drive, then from

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internal hard drive.

So from what you've described your external drive is seen by

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as an internal drive.

So what is the internal drive boot order set to in the BIOS?

Cheers, Dave

Thanks Dave for replying! The BIOS does not differentiate between the boot order of internal v.s. external disk drives. There is just one

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for setting the boot order, and the 3rd priority boot device is set to 'USB Hard Drive' This leads me to believe that the BIOS does understand about external USB hard drives that are plugged in to some USB port on the laptop. (and I assume also eSata drives plugged in to a USB/eSata port)

However, your question got me to take a second hard look at the BIOS menu and I noted that in the main menu there is a section titled 'Device Information' and under it I only see the Internal HDD and the CD/DVD devices listed... To my untrained eyes, that seems inconsistent as I had the USB/eSata hard drive plugged in when I rebooted the laptop and brought up the BIOS menu...

So I dunno if the BIOS is broken, or just does not show any

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drives in the main menu.... But the fact that there is an option in

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boot order to boot from a USB Hard Drive implies it is ok to do so... So I remain bewildered...

Marc...

Just a quick thought. Quite a while i tried to do the same, install a test-version on an external disk. Al went well, allthough one should use the extended

(not auto-config), as the new boot loader + grub stuf are by default installed on the first disk, while one should rather have it also on

On Friday 14 January 2011 00:11:28 Hans Witvliet wrote: the the BIOS menu plugged USB the menu the

usb-disk, leaving the internal disk unchanged.

hw

The GRUB auto install indeed tends to screw up in the openSUSE installer. It just want to sit on the first hard disk. I'm running also from an USB disk for some time now. How to set up in openSUSE installer: When you get to the installation overview, click bootloader Select Advanced > Edit configuration files manually device.map: Change the disk order, so that your external drive becomes (hd0). Grub always sees the disk from which it is booted as hd0, but the installer tries to name the external drive as hd1 (or anything higher than your internal disks) menu.lst Change all boot entries pointing to your external disk to hd(0,X), where the X is to be replaced by the partition where /boot resides on. In this case /dev/sdb1 is (hd0,0); /dev/sdb2 is (hd0,1) etc. Save and exit the configuration files. Now comes the tricky part, somewhere you have a screen where you can change the order of disks (somebody help me out here, it has been a long time). Anyway, just have a look at the screen, but don't change anything. Just save and exit. When you opened the screen, the manually edited configuration files where read. Upon save and close, these changes are updated to the installer. Without doing this, strange things will happen. Now enjoy the install and your booting openSUSE system! Tim Aka Muhlemmer -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org