[CentOS] Booting from an external USB drive?

Pierre-Francois Honore pfhonore at cea.fr
Mon Dec 5 15:00:52 UTC 2005


Bart Schaefer wrote:

>Is it possible?
>
>Booting the installer from the CD works, finds the USB drive, and
>allows me to put the root filesystem on it.  I put the /boot partition
>on the internal hard drive and installed GRUB in the boot record of
>that partition.
>
>GRUB shows the menu and begins booting, but eventually fails with the
>error that /dev/sda5 (the external partition) does not exist.
>
>I was hoping (perhaps in vain) that initrd would provide the necessary
>modules/hooks to mount the USB device.  Is there some step of the
>installation that I'm missing, or something extra that I need to do by
>hand, like in the old days when LILO had to be explicitly told about
>SCSI cards?
>_______________________________________________
>CentOS mailing list
>CentOS at centos.org
>http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>  
>
J Austin has a detailed PDF document http://www.vigla.eclipse.co.uk/ 
about Fedora Core Installation to an External USB Disk Drive 
<http://www.vigla.eclipse.co.uk/usb_install.pdf>. To summarize : 
install, reboot in rescue mode and create a initrd with the USB modules :

mkinitrd ––preload=ehci–hcd ––preload=usb–storage ––preload=scsi_mod \
––preload=sd_mod /boot/initrd_usb.gz 2.6.9–xx

Since 'modprobe usb–storage' does not wait for the USB drive to come up, 
you may need to add a '_sleep 5_' in the linuxrc script of initrd as 
explain on Simon Ilyushchenko <mailto:simonf at simonf.com> page : 
http://simonf.com/usb/#older.


-- 
Pierre-Francois Honore

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