Installing MEPIS to an external USB hard drive, GRUB problems
Posts: 36
I have spent some time this morning searching forums and the internet on how to solve this, but I have found nothing on my exact problem. Maybe someone here can get me going in the right direction.
My project: Installing MEPIS to an external, USB hard drive. I have a new laptop with windows XP, and a small 40GB internal drive. I want to install MEPIS on the external drive, and boot from it when I want to use it, instead of carving up my internal drive.
The install to the external drive went perfectly, a little slow, but I expected that. I went to re-boot, jumped in the BIOS and set it to boot the USB drive. The MEPIS screen came up, and I entered on the 2.6.12 kernel as usual. I then get sent to what I guess is a GRUB edit screen. This is what I'm seeing,
Grub Version 0.95
(638k lower / 227264k upper memory)
Kernel (hd1,0)/boot/vmlinuz2.6.12 root=/dev/sda1 nomce quiet splash=initrd (hd1,0)/boot/initrd.splash
I have the option to either hit "e" to edit this line or "b" to boot. So there is something i guess is wrong with that line.
My external drive is parted up like this, (from qparted)
/dev/sda
01 /dev/sda1 ext3 9.31GB
02 /dev/sda2 linux swap 953.67MB
03 /dev/sda3 ext3 60.83GB
04 /dev/sda-1 free 3.45GB
Do I need to change (hd1,0) to (sda,0) ??
This is my first encounter with grub. I thought I would post to get some more input as I read through the GRUB manual.
Thanks for any input you may have!
I saw that post, I didnt
Posts: 36
I saw that post, I didnt know if that applied to my situation or not. I will try it. Also note where it says root=/dev/sda1 it originally said root=/dev/hda1, I changed it thinking it was looking at the wrong drive. It may not matter, I forgot to mention that in the original post. Thanks, I will post back the results!
/dev/hda1 should be your
Posts: 534
/dev/hda1 should be your internal drive. If your root (/) partition for the USB drive is /dev/sda1, which looks to be the case, then the kernel parameter should be root=/dev/sda1 for booting the USB drive.
the rootdelay=10 didnt work,
Posts: 36
the rootdelay=10 didnt work, it still takes me to the same line as before. Is the (hd1,0) correct? anything else i can try?
OK, you should probably keep
Posts: 534
OK, you should probably keep the rootdelay=10 in the kernel line, but try (hd0,0) instead of (hd1,0). Since you only have two drives, it has to be one of those two notations, because Grub just counts the drives starting from zero and doesn't distinguish between the types of drives. You can be sure of what the drive is called to Grub by dropping into the grub command line (press 'c' at the menu), then getting the output of this command:
find /boot/grub/stage1
Then, if you want, you can try to use that info to boot from the grub comand line, typing:
root {output of the above find command, eg. (hd0,0)}
Kernel /boot/vmlinuz2.6.12 root=/dev/sda1 rootdelay=10 nomce quiet splash=initrd
/boot/initrd.splash
boot
That got me farther! It now
Posts: 36
That got me farther! It now boots to the blue mepis screen and gives this error:
kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)
sda: assuming drive cashe: write through
and it stops there
The computer locks up, and i have to kill the power and restart it.
Going to start googling to see what I can find
That is the syncing problem
Posts: 534
That is the syncing problem with usb drives that was supposed to be solved by the rootdelay=10 kernel parameter. Perhaps try rootdelay=15? Also, the initrd command I put above was wrong, it should be:
initrd /boot/initrd.splash
Im sorry, i didnt pay close
Posts: 36
Im sorry, i didnt pay close attention to the order you had the rootdelay in. I put it at the very end of the string. I just moved it to look like this,
Kernel /boot/vmlinuz2.6.12 root=/dev/sda1 rootdelay=10 nomce quiet splash=initrd
/boot/initrd.splash
It will now display the "Welcome to MEPIS" then,
empty log files......done
empty apt cashe.....done
Loading USB support....
and it hangs there, no errors or anything
For testing, try booting
Posts: 534
For testing, try booting with this kernel line, no initrd:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12 debug 3 rootdelay=15
If doing it on the grub command line, you can use command auto-completion by pressing the TAB key, to avoid typos.
ok, it scrolled the text so
Posts: 36
ok, it scrolled the text so fast, couldnt catch it all, it stopped with,
Warning: unable to open an initial console.
Kernel panic - not syncing: no init found. try passing init= option to kernel
Try it like this: kernel
Posts: 534
Try it like this:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12 root=/dev/sda1 debug 3 rootdelay=15
scrolls through a few
Posts: 36
scrolls through a few screens setting up hardware again, then:
Welcome to MEPIS
EXT3 FS on sda1, internal journal
empty log files.....done
empty apt cache.....done
loading USB support......
then it hangs again like before, no errors
Hmmm ... short of trying it
Posts: 534
Hmmm ... short of trying it without the rootdelay option at all, I'm a little out of ideas at the moment. Do you have anything else plugged in to USB ports when booting up? You could try disabling USB legacy support in the BIOS and turning off power before rebooting.
I didnt see any USB legacy
Posts: 36
I didnt see any USB legacy entries in the bios (Phoenix BIOS on a Compaq laptop) It doesnt have really many options at all. I also tried the string without the root delay,
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12 root=/dev/sda1 debug 3
and got a new message:
VFS: Cannot open root device "sda1" or unknown-block (0,0)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0)
<5> Vendor WD Model: 800BB External Rev: 0602
Type: direct access ANSI SCSI revision:00
SCSI device sda: 156301488 512-byte hdwr sectors (80026 MB)
sda: assuming drive cache write through
and it stops there
Thanks again for taking the time to help me sort this out, I have been reading the online GRUB doc while we have been tinkering with this thing to try to understand it better. ita alot to take in!
It looks like the rootdelay
Posts: 534
It looks like the rootdelay=10 option is doing it's job and allowing the root USB drive device to be mounted, avoiding the kernel panic. It might even avoid the panic with a lower rootdelay, eg. 5. But then you're getting a hang while loading USB drivers, which could indicate some kind of incompatibility between the laptop's USB controllers and the kernel usb drivers. That could require another kernel or a kernel recompile to fix (eg. another version of Mepis). What is the USB ouput of the lspci command (guess you'd have to do that off a live-cd)? That would show what USB controller hardware you have.
demo@ttyp1[demo]$
Posts: 36
demo@ttyp1[demo]$ lspci
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5950 (rev 01)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5a3f
0000:00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4374
0000:00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4375
0000:00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4373
0000:00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4372 (rev 11)
0000:00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4376
0000:00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4377
0000:00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4371
0000:00:14.5 Multimedia audio controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4370 (rev 02)
0000:00:14.6 Modem: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4378 (rev 02)
0000:00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge
0000:00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge
0000:00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge
0000:00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge
0000:01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5955
0000:05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
0000:05:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation: Unknown device 4318 (rev 02)
0000:05:09.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8031
demo@ttyp1[demo]$
A couple of other things I have also tried were,
1. Installing Knoppix 4.0.2 to the external drive, got the very same errors as with MEPIS.
2. I hooked the external hard drive to my desktop computer that runs MEPIS only, with a kernel 2.6.13 I got from cblue at the mepis lovers site download section. GRUB wouldnt start here either, it acted the same way as on my laptop. This was with mepis also installed to the external drive.
I also read on another forum that lilo worked better in situations like mine. I have no idea how to get this installed to the external drive or if it would even be worth the trouble.
It's odd that you can boot
Posts: 534
It's odd that you can boot the Mepis CD, but it hangs on loading the USB drivers booting from the USB drive, though we were able to get it farther in the boot process than at first by using (hd0,0), root=/dev/sda1 and rootdelay=10. At this point, you might want to try some additional boot parameters in the kernel line, such as the original ones that were there (nomce), plus some others like acpi=off, acpi=noirq or pci=biosirq. These are documented somewhat in the 2.6.12 source in Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt. You could also try confirm as a kernel parameter to get an interactive boot. I don't know if the parameters usb-handoff or nousb (suicidal?) would be any help . Also, you could try unplugging any additional USB devices before boot. Besides that, I'd see if anyone has any tips on the web for using Linux with your laptop. Someone else was posting about a hang on loading usb support recently, http://www.mepis.org/node/8755 . But they were also getting IRQ errors.
i seem to have gotten it by
Posts: 1
i seem to have gotten it by just doing:
edit /etc/mkinitrd/modules so that it contains:
usb-uhci
ehci-hcd
usb-storage
sd_mod
ide-disk
(i had to resort to 2.4 'cause 2.6 doesn't like my laptop's intel 915...)
i yanked that off of a debian to usb fix, but i can't run mkinitrd, so i'm clueless if i'm missing a huge chunk of things... also seems that X doesn't wanna load now... but i can log in!
Been running MEPIS on a
Posts: 53
Been running MEPIS on a mini-USB external (laptop drive in a LaCie enclosure for months) The machine is an HP Pavilion ZX5000 laptop, 3GHZ P4 with 1.5 GB ram. I just read through this thread, but I didn't notice anyone suggesting kernel arguments. I use acpi=off and nomce - It generally works very well - occasionally, it will fail to boot all the way. I haven't exactly traced the cause - sometimes the sound won't come up, sometimes the wifi card can't get an address, this weekend, I just went to a black screen at the end of the boot. Usually, just shutting the machine all the way down to power-off recycles what ails it, and it boots subsequently. This behavior is erratic, and short-lived when it happens, so I'm living with it till I can hopefully figure it out. But, once it gets up, it runs very well.
Try adding rootdelay=10 to
Posts: 534
Try adding rootdelay=10 to your kernel line:
Kernel (hd1,0)/boot/vmlinuz2.6.12 root=/dev/sda1 nomce quiet splash=initrd rootdelay=10
http://www.mepis.org/node/8642