usb pen drive installation

[CrunKMunkY]

alright everyone im new to this site and fairly new to linux for that matter, so let me clarify a couple things right now. one, im a noob. two, my last name is Crunkleton, thus i have exclusive rights to the use of the word "crunk" in my username, or anywhere else for that matter, and refuse to be grouped with the cliche slang slinging teenage populous of america, so :P .

 

anyways....

 

ok guys, i have a 6 GB usb pen drive, linux compatible, and im trying to install a linux OS on here. I have FC4 which comes with the GRUB bootloader upon installation. my /dev/sda1 is about 5.6 GB and is the standard ext3 filesystem. /dev/sda2 is my swap. i installed FC4 and GRUB successfully and GRUB will boot off of my pen drive i just cant seem to get it pointed in the right direction to boot right.

 

what i am aiming to do here is to be able to boot off of usb on any computer that allows usb booting. can someone lend a hand to this poor unfortunate soul?

 

thanks :)

[CrunKMunkY]

anyone know of a way i can install a bootloader to a usb and point it to a usb? i thought about trying lilo, but once again im a noob and thought id ask before i go screwin stuff up

[anyweb]

have you installed fedora core linux 4 on the key or on a local hdd ?

 

you could try running 'grub-install' on the key itself, lilo is depreciated in fedora

 

cheers

anyweb

[CrunKMunkY]

yes i installed grub on the pen drive, and i turned my legacy USB on with USB as my first boot selection. it will load grub, i just cant figure out how to get grub to load fc4 on the pen drive, it can never find the kernel

[anyweb]

press 'e' on the grub screen it should let you edit the command line arguments

 

try and point it (grub) to the path of the kernel

 

good luck

[CrunKMunkY]

i try but it always says it cant find the kernel.

here is my grub.conf on my pen drive:

 

#boot=/dev/sda

default=0

timeout=5

splashimage=(hd1,1)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz

hiddenmenu

title Fedora Core-usb (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4)

root (hd1,1)

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet

initrd /boot/2.6.11-1.1369_FC4-usb.img

 

Note: I had to make a custom initrd according to a tutorial i found online. Also I have one hard internal HDD and I guess GRUB sees USB as (hd#,#) right? My internal HDD is hd0 and FC4 is installed on sda1. Since it is on sda1, I thought the root might be (hd1,0) but that never works and tells me the filesystem is 0x07 (HPFS/NTFS). I don't know why that is, my sda1 partition starts on the first cylinder. When I make (hd1,1) root, it tells me the filesystem is 0x83.

[anyweb]

try changing hd1,1 to sd1,1

 

where is your kernel stored ? on hd1 or sd1 ?

[znx]

Ok, the issue will be "what does sda show up as in grub?". Normal to work this out you can check device.map in the boot directory:

 

Code:

# cat /boot/grub/device.map
(fd0)   /dev/fd0
(hd0)   /dev/hda
(hd1)   /dev/hdb
(hd2)   /dev/sda

 

You can see that hd2 is my sda (USB) device. I have two hard disk (hd0 and hd1) and a floppy drive (fd0). If you can't do this then try a guess.

 

How many hard disks do you have, start the number from 0 and count forward.

 

Hope that helps.

 

Oh I should also indicate that partition numbers start from 0 in grub as well.

 

Code:

/dev/sda1 -> (hd2,0)
/dev/sda2 -> (hd2,1)

 

If sda is missing from device.map you can try rescanning:

 

Code:

# grub-install --recheck
# cat /boot/grub/device.map

[anyweb]

nicely explained znx !

 

pinned !

[CrunKMunkY]

I had already checked device.map earlier and it gave me:

 

Code:

(fd0) /dev/fd0
(hd0) /dev/hda
(hd1) /dev/sda

 

in terminal i typed fdisk /dev/sda to check to see if my partitions were correct

 

Code:

/dev/sda1     boot flag     starts on cylinder 1       ends on cylinder 935        filesystem ID 83
/dev/sda2                starts on cylinder 936     ends on cylinder 1018       filesystem ID 82

 

then i went into the GRUB shell and tried to set my root as (hd1,0) (i tried this before also, but it didnt seem to work before). it worked and it told me the filesystem was 0x83, so that was good. i made the changes to my grub.conf.

 

Code:

#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd1,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core-usb (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/2.6.11-1.1369_FC4-usb.img

 

but then when i tried to boot it with the root as (hd1,0), it said that the filesystem was 0x07 and then gave me the same old "Error 17: Unable to mount selected partition" or whatever it says.