linux on laptop / usb drive

[Guest geekburgerx]

After trying for quite a while to get le2005 to run on my usb 2.0 hard drive (including making a new initrd image) i decided to give 10.1 a try because i heard that it would install find on an external drive. The install process was fine and the first time i booted was also fine. Once the system was booted there was one weird problem, whenever i tried to open any folder or just open konquerer the tab would show up but the window would never load and the tab would eventually dissapear. i decided to restart and havent been able to boot since. Since then ive tried a few different usb 2.0 drives that i have and i have run into the same problem on all of them.

 

Heres my problem:

 

mandrake 10.1 boots until the step:

"initializing firewire controller (ohci1394) [ok]"

than hangs for a few minutes..

after this i get the error "INIT: cannot execute "/sbin/mingetty"

which is repeated on the screen a few times followed by "INIT: id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes"

and this is repeated until "id 6" after which i get "init: no more processes left in this runlevel" after which the process starts over with the mingetty error.

this is where the booting process stops.

 

ive tried reinstalling changing a few things here and there, trying different drives, different file systems.. but im really new to linux and have no idea what is causing this. when the boot up doesnt stall after the firewire controller its stalls after "starting netprofile" but leads to the same errors.

 

the few times i have actually gotten into kde theres a weird problem where my harddrive is accessed every few seconds and every time it is accessed my mouse skips or sticks. messing with my network connections seemed to change things a little (stopped the sticking mouse for a little while by disabling my wired connection, and was able to boot by disabling my wireless connection in the bios), but as soon as i tried to set up my wired network connection the mouse sticking came back and now i cant boot again.

 

any help with this situation would be great.. ive been trying for nearly a month to get mandrake running off an external drive on my laptop.

 

 

the specs of my system:

 

30 gig usb 2.0 hard drive, formatted ext3

1.8ghz pentium m, 1 gig ram

broadcom ethernet port, intel centrino wireless (pro/2200)

grub is on the usb drive and i boot straight to that drive

internal drive is formatted ntfs with xp installed

attempting to run mandrake 10.1

 

 

thanks for any help.

[devries]

I think it is a formatting issue:

 

Furthermore, the installation on the external usb drive is problematic in the sense that newly created ext3 partitions couldn't be formatted and were seen as vfat:ext2 partitions.

 

The workaround there was to boot from dvd into the rescue mode, then use fdisk to create the partitions and mke2fs to format them. During the installation the choice had to be 'use existing partitions' and the proposed formatting of the / partition had to be turned off. The initial installation attempts and formatting were done on dell2, but the final installation was done on dell1 (without partitioning and formatting). There was no other reason for doing the installation on dell1 than that dell2 wasn't available at the moment I had more time to continue the initial installation, by all means the installer worked fine (apart from the usb drive related issues).

 

http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/review101.html

 

Try to install it as described here.

[Guest geekburgerx]

ok, i tried that today, and ended up with the same problem..

it gets to "starting netprofile [ok] "

than hangs for quite a few minutes and i end up with a screen full of

"INIT: cannot execute "/sbin/mingetty"

and "INIT: id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes"

 

any other idea as to what may be causing this?

thanks

[pmpatrick]

Have you taken a look at this article from IBM:

 

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linu...-lnxw42FireBoot

 

Note the linuxrc config file at the bottom. It's talking in terms of devfs/2.4 kernels but the rescanning of the scsi bus may be necessary as the article refers to a timing issue when mounting the root filesystem. Can you post your linuxrc in your initrd.img?