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? My guess is that you will need to manually add the various usb and scsi drivers to the initrd image. You might even have to mount /proc/bus/usb at the initrd stage. Also check the initrd creates the necessary device files for your drive James Pearson