neddie Posted May 20, 2007 Report Share Posted May 20, 2007 OK, so I extracted the files and indeed _do_ see usb stuff inside lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/kernel/drivers/usb, a bunch of .ko files but I'm not much wiser. So at least it appears that the initrd has the ubs stuff (this is trying with Debian now so can't vouch for Mandriva), so I did another round of googling and found some very useful info. When grub loads from the external drive, I can press "e" to edit the boot command. There, the first line says root (hd1,0) Following instructions found on the ubuntu forums, I changed this to root (hd0,0) (apparently because grub is now loading from the external drive, the external drive becomes 0, not 1. Don't ask me). Note that this change is only temporary, it only works for this boot and on the next boot grub will again try to load from 1. But anyway, just with this temporary edit, when I press "b" to boot, it finds everything and loads up into my first ever Debian! :D Apparently if I edit grub's menu.lst file this change will become permanent, but I haven't tried that yet, I just wanted to get the thing booting. So to sum it up, I tried installing Mandriva, it didn't work so I tried again with Debian. This didn't work either, with very similar error messages, but with this grub config change Debian now boots. So it's possible, -maybe even probable- that the same edit would fix the Spring install too. But I'm not much inclined to try it out cos I've already got Spring on my internal drive and want to continue looking at Debian. :D Thanks for your help, chris and pmpatrick! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris:b Posted May 20, 2007 Report Share Posted May 20, 2007 When grub loads from the external drive, I can press "e" to edit the boot command. There, the first line saysroot (hd1,0) Following instructions found on the ubuntu forums, I changed this to root (hd0,0) (apparently because grub is now loading from the external drive, the external drive becomes 0, not 1. Don't ask me). Note that this change is only temporary, it only works for this boot and on the next boot grub will again try to load from 1. But anyway, just with this temporary edit, when I press "b" to boot, it finds everything and loads up into my first ever Debian! :D Apparently if I edit grub's menu.lst file this change will become permanent, but I haven't tried that yet, I just wanted to get the thing booting. So to sum it up, I tried installing Mandriva, it didn't work so I tried again with Debian. This didn't work either, with very similar error messages, but with this grub config change Debian now boots. So it's possible, -maybe even probable- that the same edit would fix the Spring install too. But I'm not much inclined to try it out cos I've already got Spring on my internal drive and want to continue looking at Debian. :D Thanks for your help, chris and pmpatrick! That's it, neddie. Will also work for MDV I guess. I am not familiar with GRUB, but basically it does confuse the drives when it generates the config file. Good catch. And have fun with Debian :-) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted May 21, 2007 Report Share Posted May 21, 2007 Neddie, that's another problem specific to grub. How grub enumerates the drives, i.e. which one is hd0, hd1, etc, can change depending on the state of the system. See my related post on this subject here: https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtop...518&hl=grub You seem to have run into a similar problem with the external hard drive, i.e. it shifts from hd1 to hd0 at boot time. I'm wondering whether the same problem would exist with lilo. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neddie Posted May 21, 2007 Report Share Posted May 21, 2007 Hmm, that does sound very similar. I was assuming it was a Mandriva bug that the grub config wasn't being created appropriately (as Mandriva should know that the external drive would become 0) but based on what you wrote maybe not. I suspect that the same happened with lilo too (I tried installing Spring with both grub and lilo and neither worked). I'm still using lilo with my internal Spring, by the way, although I guess my internal setup (single drive, dual boot) is simple enough not to cause problems with grub. Oh, and I edited my grub menu.lst for Debian and now it boots without problems. Although I then tried it on another machine (a desktop) and it froze trying to do something with /dev/sdb so maybe it's not as portable as I imagined. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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