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Installing Mandrake On External HD...Possible?


Guest gigahorsepower
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Guest gigahorsepower

Bismillaah. Salaam; I have a new Compaq Presario 2500 Notebook, running Win XP Home, 40GB HD, P4, 2.4Hz. I've recently purchased a Maxtor 80GB External usb, HD. I would like to mount either Mandrake 8.2, or 9.1, on the Maxtor HD. I have read conflicting information to the effect that it cannot be done, and that it can be done. I would like to believe that it is possible to install Linux, on an external HD. Has anyone here ever installed an OS, on an external hard drive? How is it done? How difficult is it to accomplish? What restrictions, if any, are there? Your help in this matter will be appreciated.

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Guest gigahorsepower

Bismillaah. Salaam(peace); Thanks pmpatrick, for the advice, it's appreciated. But, I still would like to read someone else's experiences with the external drive. It doesn't seem possible that no one has tried it.

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I'd wait for 9.2; should have better USB2 support. If the install program sees the drive, you should be OK. I wouldn't install a boot loader, either lilo or grub; both would probably act up if the home drive where missing. Just select the option to boot off a floppy. That's another problem with 9.1; the boot floppy thing is broke on the install program. It worked fine in the 9.2 rc install I did. I'm curious to see if that would work myself. I know there's a hdcdrom_usb image on the 9.1 and 9.2 rc install disk. you may have to use that to get the drive detected by the install program.

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Guest gigahorsepower

Bismillaah. Salaam(Peace); The most recent information I've received is that due to lack of dos support, my usb drive is not bootable. What do you think concerning dos drivers for my HD? Where can I find third party dos drivers for my external HD? Your help will be appreciated.

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Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. My usb zip drive is bootable. It's just a storage device on the usb bus. If the bios sees it and can handle booting off it I should think you would be OK. Anyway, you don't need DOS drivers to boot anything in linux. It sounds to me like a windows limitation, i.e. you can't install a windows OS on the drive due to the lack of a DOS driver. I can't see how that should apply to linux.

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I would like to echo pmpatrick's evaluation of dos drivers. Linux uses the bios identification method in order to determine the presence of hardware. So, if an item is in the bios, it is in linux. Windex is notorius for identifying things its own way. It doesn't use the bios, which is really a limitation rather than a benefit. Windex first started doing this as a ploy for cheaper components. But it is turning out that it is merely another way for microbrains to control the hardware market.

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Well, I finally did it; broke down and bought an external usb hard drive. It's a maxtor one touch external hard drive, usb 2.0/1.1. Finally got it working pretty good in mdk9.1 but there were a few bumps along the way. Thought I'd pass along my experience and respond to the question posed by the initial post in the hopes it might be useful to some one.

 

I booted into mdk and plugged in the drive which was immediately recognized in diskdrake as /dev/sda. That's the good news. The bad news, diskdrake was unable to properly partition and format the drive nor did it recognize the existing FAT32 partition on the drive. The drive was reported as unallocated space. When I attempted to partition, diskdrake would make to two identical overlapping partitions. Basically it was a mess. Bottom line, DO NOT attempt to partition the drive with diskdrake.

 

I installed the windows drivers in win98se and connected the drive. I then connected the drive which was detected by windows and used acronis partition expert to clean up diskdrake's mess and parition and format the drive creating two extended/ogical partitions, one large FAT32 and a 10GB reiserfs.

 

Booted back to mdk and the partitions were detected in diskdrake and automounted as sda5 and sda6. I don't like/trust the automount feature for usb storage devices so edited fstab to get rid of it and set up the standard lines for for sda5 and sda6 both of which included the noauto option. I remounted sda5 and sda6 and everything worked fine. Hdparm revealed transfer rates of 14MB/sec which indicated that usb 2.0 was being used(usb 1.1 is limited to 1.5MB/sec). So far so good.

 

Next I attempted to install mdk 9.2 rc-2 on the external drive. Again, good news and bad news. The good news, mdk detected the external hard drive, no problem. After my bad experience with diskdrake, I didn't want the mdk partitioning tools to touch the drive so I selected the option to install on the existing partitions. I selected the reiserfs parition on the external drive for the entire install and it went fine using only one partion for the install. Created a boot floppy and thought I was ready to go.

 

No such luck. When I rebooted with the floppy, I got a kernel panic; despite repeated attempts, the root fiilesystem could not be mounted. Booted back into mdk9.1 and saw that everything had been installed om sda6. I copied the vmlinuz and initrd from the mdk9.2 install over to mdk9.1's /boot directory and created an entry in lilo.conf for mdk9.2 on sda6. Rebooted and tried to load mdk9.2 with the same result; root could not be mounted. I think this is due to the usb-storage module not being loaded until latter in the boot process. Tried passing some kernel parameters to no effect; couldn't mount root no matter what I tried.

 

Back to the drawing board. I reasoned that since the usb-storage module is in root, it might work if I created a root partition on my internal hard drive and /home, /usr, and /var partitions on the external drive. Used acronis partition expert to create a 500MB root partition on my internal drive and /home(3GB), /usr(3GB) and /var(1GB) partitions on the external drive. Redid the 9.2 install using this partitoning scheme. Rebooted and it worked :D :D :D

 

Bottom line, until some one can figure out how to get the usb-storage module to load early in the boot process, you have to put your root partition on an internal drive. That's not so bad since the root partition is relatively small and can easily fit in a 500MB partition. You can probably get it down to 200MB if you want but I like to leave myself lots of room. The vast bulk of the data is in /home and /usr and /var can fill up, depending on what your doing. Anyway, it's a way of getting the bulk of an install on an external drive only using a modest amount of space on your internal drive.

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Guest GorGor

Edited

 

umm, forgive any ignorance on my part as I don't have a external drive, but know a tiny amount on grub.

 

would this be helpful

 

kernel (sd0,1) /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda6

initrd (sd0,1) /boot/initrd.img

 

to be appended to grub on mbr with a title boring like "USB"

 

EXPLAIN

 

sd0 = first scsi drive detected so if you already have such drives you will have to increase the number.

 

the 0 is ONE in grub speak.

 

sd0,1 the ONE is the therefore the second partition (yep I fell for it and had to edit this post)

 

root details: GRUB expects from root to find this file vmlinuz So if you have stuck it somewhere else please amend the folder structure.

 

INITRD is ditto rules

 

(2) alternatively, assuming you have grub on mbr, go into E for edit mode when grub appears and try amending one of your boot options. Try amending the floppy one?

The edit function allows you to amend the boot commands and that is why I have written those commands without a title command.

 

Can you post any feedback IF you trust my meagre knowledge of grub.

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Thanks for the input Gor Gor but I don't think it's a problem with the boot loader. I use lilo anyway. The vmlinuz and initrd were found by lilo and they're on the floppy so that's not the problem. The problem comes where root should be mounted resulting in a kernel panic. My best guess is that this is due to the usb-storage module not loading before the time root is to be mounted. That module is necessary for linux to recognize the external usb drive; if it's not loaded, linux won't see the external drive and give a kernel panic. The fact that it works when I move the root partition to an internal drive lends credance to this speculation.

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Guest GorGor

No worries for me. Editted reply

 

1) umm, any chance you have considered re-compiling a kernel with USB support inbuilt rather than moduled?

 

2) If you think its only a time issue How about a wait =timeout command appended to your lilo to allow the module to load. I don't know as I don't use lilo as U can guess

 

I am guessing timeout could be used when I had a quick look just now it is used for other reasons but what the heck I am only asking a question!

 

btw I am pursuing this thread myself as, if you or someone else gets it to work, I might have to buy one, heh heh

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Guest GorGor

I am a dummy, I half knew that wait timeout was the wrong keyword in grub its PAUSE

and for grub users heres the explain

 

http://www.gnu.org/manual/grub/html_node/p...ause.html#pause

 

I had a bo peep at lilo's pdf manual and correct me if I am wrong, ok I am always wrong, heh heh, but I can not find a pause function in LILO.

 

timeout and delay appear to be commands in lilo, but I don't know enough about lilo to figure out how they can be used as a PAUSE function if needed.

 

Jumping back to grub a possible place for the gurus would be to have grub on floppy with commands like

title external drive

kernel (sd0,2) /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda3

pause

(fd0) /module files root=/dev/fd0

module probeall scsi_hostadapter usb-storage && usb-storage usb-uhci

pause

initrd (sd0,2) /boot/initrd.img

 

Now I am guessing these modules may enable USB correctly cos shock horror stun, I have bugger all hardware and have dinosaur brains. One of my floppies is 1.3 Megs whether you can put the modules on the same floppy is mute to me as I can't test.

 

goodluck if you can get this to work if you care to try please make sure you have a working boot disk and have backed up all data ...I recommend partimage.

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  • 11 months later...
Guest nemihome

At first. Sorry for my English. I am from Germany. ;)

 

I have the same problem. I have the Maxtor One Touch 250GB external hard drive. I have installed Mandrake 10. I can boot with grub from this hard drive. In the moment where the Kernel tries to mount the root directory I get the kernel panic message.

 

Do anyone know how to kompile a kernel with usb support? (I am not experienced with Linux)

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At first. Sorry for my English. I am from Germany. ;)

 

I have the same problem. I have the Maxtor One Touch 250GB external hard drive. I have installed Mandrake 10. I can boot with grub from this hard drive. In the moment where the Kernel tries to mount the root directory I get the kernel panic message.

 

Do anyone know how to kompile a kernel with usb support? (I am not experienced with Linux)

 

No but I just compiled a kernel with my ATI drivers. And I stayed at a holiday Inn.....

 

-Luis

 

PS I'm sure some one will help you I had some one guide me thrue it.

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I will be doing this eventually.

 

The Linux partitioning tools don't like dealing with external drives, i had trouble partitioning my LaCie with cfdisk and mkfs and friends. However partition magic did it perfectly.

 

One workaround to the usb-storage problem is to build your own kernel with it included, i myself include all my drivers in the kernel itself, excepting wireless and audio.

 

iphitus

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