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Installing Mandriva 2008 on external HDD


bryanlee1981
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Hey everyone,

I am attempting to install Mandriva 2008 onto my western digital 250g external hard drive. My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 9300. Here is what i have done so far and the results.

 

First thing i did was change the boot precedence to put usb as primary and the HDD as secondary. I would like for everything to be on the external so that it does not effect the MBR on my internal HDD. I tried to take the internal HDD out of the equation by removing it, but found i was unable to even boot from a disk without it. Not a big deal so i moved on. Now to the actual install.

 

I inserted my Mandriva 2008 Live CD.

 

Everything loads fine and the install wizard finds both my HDD and my external drive.

 

I select the external HDD and format it as follows:

/

/swap

/home

 

The install process continues on and seems to be going fine.

 

At the end of the process i get an option of where to install GRUB.

 

The options are:

 

/dev/sda (internal)

/dev/sdb (lots of numbers here)

/dev/sdb1 (root)

/dev/sdb5 (swap)

/dev/sdb6 (home)

 

I tried installing GRUB to both /dev/sdb and /dev/sdb1

 

I dont want the grub installed on my internal HDD although i have a hunch that it would work if i put it here. Shouldn't i be able to install GRUB onto the external and boot from there without altering the MBR on my internal HDD?

 

After installing to either /dev/sdb or /dev/sdb1 it tells me to remove the media and restart. Everything still looks good up to this point.

 

During the restart it tries to boot from the external(which is good), but it hangs at the Mandriva splash screen. There is a progress bar at the bottom left of the screen but it never moves. In addition to that my Caps Lock and Scroll Lock lights begin to blink. Not sure if that means anything.

 

In order to restart from here I have to kill power to my laptop. I'm lost after this and hoping someone can tell me where i went wrong.

 

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

Bryan

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  • 2 weeks later...
Guest cabpciga

I am experiencing the exact same problem with Mandriva 2008.1.

 

I have 2 hard drives. 1 internal and 1 external (WD 320GB USB).

 

I formatted it as:

 

/boot (ext3)

/ (ext3)

swap

/home (ext3)

 

The install process works great. I had no problems with that at all. When the installation finishes and I reboot, I get stuck at the splash screen just like bryanlee1981 does. I've probably installed this about 5 times already with the same ending result.

 

So my 2 questions would be: 1) Is the boot loader supposed to be in the MBR of my external drive? and 2) What could be causing this to freeze?

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During installation, it would be good to see where the boot loader is being installed. The best place would be the MBR of the external disk. Then make sure your BIOS can boot from USB disks, and set this to boot before the internal hard disk. Then, you should find your installation working.

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Guest cabpciga

As far as I can tell, my BIOS can boot from USB disks because I'm able to set it to boot before the internal hard disk. I've been putting the boot loader in the MBR of the external drive and I still get the same result. It does begin to boot, but then when i get to the splash screen, it freezes. When I hit escape i get this:

 

NFORCE-MCP55: IDE port disabled

usb 1-6: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3

usb 1-6: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice

usb 2-3: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 2

usb 2-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice

hda: LITE-ON DVDRW LH-18A1P, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

hda: UDMA/66 mode selected

ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7, 0x3f6 on irq 14

Loading ide-disk module

Could not resolve resume device (/dev/sdb6)

Trying suspend2 resume

Trying tuxonice resume

Creating root device.

Mounting root filesystem.

mount: could not find filesystem '/dev/root'

Setting up other filesystems.

Setting up new root fs

setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory

no fstab.sys, mounting internal defaults

setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory

setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory

Switching to new root and running init.

unmounting old /dev

unmounting old /proc

unmounting old /sys

switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory

Booting has failed.

 

I'm fairly new to Linux so I'm very stumped. I tried this very same DVD at school and it worked fine, though I didn't use the USB hard drive. Any ideas?

 

Oh, and these are the partition names:

 

/boot (ext3) [sdb1]

/ (ext3) [sdb5]

swap [sdb6]

/home (ext3) [sdb7]

Edited by cabpciga
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Quickly reading your output, I have the following observations:

 

1. Your bios is properly detecting your usb drive and loads the grub bootloader from the mbr on your usb drive;

 

2. After grub loads and apparently loads the kernel vmlinuz and initrd which it locates in /boot on the usb drive, the kernel seems to be unable to read the usb drive partitions when it takes over.

 

All this would indicate that the initrd generated during the installation may not have the appropriate modules to detect and use a usb hard drive at boot time. Since two people are reporting the same issue, I would suspect a bug in the installation routine, perhaps one which only becomes apparent with certain hardware configurations.

Edited by pmpatrick
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There's a few things you could try. Your usb drive is designated /dev/sdb during installation but that may change when you set it as the first boot device in your bios, i.e. it may go from sdb to sda. Note the output where it says it can't find the resume device, /dev/sdb6. It may be that the resume device, a/k/a your swap partition, is now sda6. The top four lines indicate the usb modules, ehci and ohci are loading. The puzzling thing is that mdv2008.1 designates the root partition in grub using UUID instead of device file and UUID should be invariant. As such, the root partition should be found regardless of device file naming.

 

One thing you can try fooling around with is passing various options and edits to grub. When you see the grub boot screen hit the Esc key and then Enter which will take you to an ncurses version of that screen. Select the boot entry you want, probably "linux", And then hit the "e" key. That will allow you to edit the grub entry. Try changing the root= line from UUID to /dev/sda1, i.e. from:

 

root=UUID=<long sequence of letters and numbers>

 

to:

 

root=/dev/sda1

 

See if it will boot.

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