Guest Portable Phreak Posted March 30, 2006 Report Share Posted March 30, 2006 I have recently bought a Freecom CLASSIC SL external HDD and was irritated when i saw an advert in a magazine for a Portable Mandriva distro and Lacie globetrotter external HDD, I would have loved to purchase this problem but now having a spen £60 on a 250GB HDD, i can not afford to. However i would really love to run this portable linux solution on my HDD and was wondering how to, I'm not new to linux (i'm no expert either) i've been using it for a couple of years and just wanted some information on whether and if so, how this could be done! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted March 30, 2006 Report Share Posted March 30, 2006 How does the disk attach to your machine? USB? You might be able to configure your BIOS to boot from USB devices, if so, this will be really easy. Otherwise, you would have to install to the USB disk, and then install lilo/grub to the mbr of your internal hard disk, and then when you boot, you can choose the portable disk from the menu options listed to you on the boot loader. Unfortunately, connecting to another machine, would require lilo/grub on that machine too to boot from the usb disk unless the bios allowed booting from the portable usb disk. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Portable Phreak Posted March 30, 2006 Report Share Posted March 30, 2006 Yes, I know that as I have tried however, when i install the bootloader on external HDD MBR and boot the disk through the bios it doesn't boot and when i installed slackware, and installed Lilo to the MBR, it also wouldn't boot, I also tried booting the Kernel from a CD, and it was unable to mount the root FS, so................ i figure i need to install the bootloader on an internal HDD, and the kernel needs to load somekind of drivers first before it tries to mount the FS, but where can i find that. I'm getting quite a headache with this but i have already tried your suggestion, soembody with knowledge of how the Lacie Globetrotter with Mandriva works will probably be able to put me straight ;) B) :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted March 30, 2006 Report Share Posted March 30, 2006 That's what I said, install lilo/grub to the internal hdd disk :P Instead of installing to lilo/grub /dev/sda as the disk will appear, you need to install lilo/grub to /dev/hda as this is an internal hard disk. Normally at the end of installation, there is a summary option for Boot Loader, and you can click this to make changes, and change the hard disk you are installing the bootloader to. By default it will pick the external hard disk since you are installing Mandriva here. So you need to click it at the summary screen, and choose another hard disk preferable /dev/hda since your machine's bios will be configured to boot from this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Portable Phreak Posted March 30, 2006 Report Share Posted March 30, 2006 Yes.......... but this needs to be a portable solution so i can't just go installing grub/lilo on any machine i use! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted March 30, 2006 Report Share Posted March 30, 2006 Then you need a BIOS that supports booting from external USB disks, or whatever the type is you have has to set in the BIOS to boot from this external disk first. Otherwise, as far as I know, you're unlikely to get it to work, since the BIOS needs to see this hard disk before any other hard disk to be able to read lilo/grub from the external hard disk and boot. If it can't be set in the BIOS, then you can always make a floppy disk and use this to boot the system by calling the external hard disk. Or a bootable CD-ROM. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted March 31, 2006 Report Share Posted March 31, 2006 This is a much more complicated problem than you've been led to believe. Check out this article for details: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linu...lnxw02aFireBoot Now that's with a 2.4 kernel that uses devfs and the script at the end of the article references rescanning the scsi bus and restarting devfs. I don't know how you would modify that for a 2.6 kernel which uses udev instead of devfs. The key is creating a custom initrd.img which loads all the usb modules necessary to mount the usb drive and to rescan the scsi bus to get around some timing issues. Without that, you won't be able to detect your root filesystem on the usb drive. The above will give you a bootable mandiva install on a usb drive if properly implemented. However, I don't know how portable that would be. When thrown on a new box, you will have to go through a lot of hardware redetection which may or may not go smoothly; the standard mandriva distro wasn't really designed for this. The install on the lacie from mandriva is undoubtedly a customized version. You would probably be better off with a livecd and a usb flash drive for a persistent home. IIRC PCLOS has this functionality; it's based on mandriva and free: http://on-disk.com/product_info.php/products_id/69 I believe kanotix and knoppix also have this fuctionality. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted April 5, 2006 Report Share Posted April 5, 2006 Hate to follow my own post, but I thought anyone interested in this topic may want to look at this thread on the pclos forum: http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=3043.0 It explains how to get a portable version of pclos on to a usb hard drive and have it be bootable. The kernel and hardware redection issues have already been worked out and since pclos is very close to mandriva, this looks like the easiest option for making your own portable hard drive with a bootable linux distro capable of doing on the fly hardware detection. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crazyspongebob Posted July 12, 2006 Report Share Posted July 12, 2006 I have recently bought a Freecom CLASSIC SL external HDD and was irritated when i saw an advert in a magazine for a Portable Mandriva distro and Lacie globetrotter external HDD, I would have loved to purchase this problem but now having a spen £60 on a 250GB HDD, i can not afford to. However i would really love to run this portable linux solution on my HDD and was wondering how to, I'm not new to linux (i'm no expert either) i've been using it for a couple of years and just wanted some information on whether and if so, how this could be done! I am currently running Mandriva 2006 on a WD Passport 40 GB (usb 2.0) with no fuss at all. Mandriva 2006 is one of the easiest distro to put on a ext hard drive. I had tried Ubuntu 5.10 on the drive with some tweaking. I just have to configure the BIOS to boot from usb on any computer that I plug my hard drive in. J.T. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.