Installing to and booting from external USB hard drive

John Austin ja at jaa.org.uk
Fri Dec 1 16:15:19 UTC 2006


On Fri, 2006-12-01 at 09:02 -0600, linux wrote:
> I have a Maxtor One Touch III, external USB, drive which I wish to use 
> as my sole hard drive on my Fedora Core 6 machine.  Can I simply remove 
> all my hard drives from the machine, plug in the Maxtor One Touch then 
> proceed with installation as usual to achieve this?
> 
> Ed
> 
Hi
Probably not !

The following worked fine for FC5, modify kernel version shown below (2.6.15-1.2054_FC5) as required.
Probably 2.6.18-1.2798.fc6


boot from FC6 DVD or CD1
Type "linux expert" instead of accepting the default
The USB drive should show up as a SCSI device (sda maybe)
Partition and Install as usual to this device.
Install grub to the MBR of this device

At the very end when asked to remove media and reboot - don't !!
Cont/Alt/F2	to go to the second virtual terminal
chroot /mnt/sysimage

/sbin/mkinitrd --preload=ehci-hcd --preload=ohci-hcd  --preload=usb-storage \
--preload=scsi_mod --preload=sd_mod /boot/initrd_usb.gz \
2.6.15-1.2054_FC5

It is possible to use vi to edit /boot/grub/grub.conf at this stage
or use grub interactively for the first boot and change grub.conf later
#################################################################
Edit the very last line of grub.conf changing the initrd file name to that used
above ie initrd_usb.gz
#########################
Original FC6 grub.conf on my machine prior to changing last line
(Ignore all the disk designations !!!)
#########################
avon.jaa.org.uk grub 692# cat grub.conf
# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You do not have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg.
#          root (hd1,4)
#          kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/sdb5
#          initrd /boot/initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/sdb5
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd1,4)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title FC6 (2.6.18-1.2798.fc6)
        root (hd1,4)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 ro root=LABEL=/12 rhgb quiet
        initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.img
###########################################################################
Having said all this it may be cleaner to leave in one of your existing disks
and install your /boot partition and grub on this disk.
See
http://www.vigla.eclipse.co.uk/

John







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