Installing RHEL on a USB hard drive... not going well.

justletmeviewthepage · 05-30-2008, 05:12 PM

I want to install a copy of Red Hat Enterprise 64-bit on a USB Western Digital mini hard drive. I went through with the install, setting it as "hdc" in the install (my bios recognize the usb hard drive as an "hd" rather than an "sd"). Everything seemed ok with the install, but when it came to boot, it failed to load correctly and dumped me into the command line GRUB. I tried to issue the normal boot commands, but to no avail, I was stuck.

What went wrong here? Is it a problem with the mapping of the hard drives and partitions? I have a suspicion that it could have something to do with the drive order (must I set the USB drive to the primary drive in the motherboard bios rather than the third?). I also am not sure if this problem could be caused by my motherboard recognising the USB hard drive as an "hd" and not the usual "sd". Then finally, I have heard that it could be a problem associated with the 64-bit RHEL and my AMD64 processor (sounds unlikely though).

Point is that I have never done an install on a portable hard drive before and really need some help. The thing just doesn't want to boot correctly.

Thanks in advance!

smbell100 · 05-30-2008, 08:40 PM

There was a problem with RHEL 4 that sounds similar to this. Initrd didn't have the USB drivers, so couldn't boot a USB hard drive. Better explanation and corrective action at http://www.bergercorp.com/assets/lea...RHEL4onUSB.pdf.

Hope this helps

smart_axiom · 08-21-2008, 05:39 PM

Hi there,

What you need to do is make sure that grub is installed on the MBR of the USB HDD and that /boot/grub/grub.conf is finding the "grub root" partition (root for grub that is) which is basically where /boot resides. If you created a partition mounted to /boot during the installation process in disk druid, then most probably it will be the first partition on the first disk i.e. (hd0,0) in grub terminology.

so boot into linux rescue mode with your usb HDD connected, change root to the "Linux root" (/) residing on the USB HDD. Determine what device is associated with the USB HDD (e.g. sda) and install grub on its MBR:

# fdisk -ls --> will list HDD and partition devices
# grub-install /dev/sda --> will install grub on the MBR of the HDD mapped to sda

Then inspect /boot/grub/grub.conf on your USB HDD and make sure that it is seeing the grub root (the partition containing /boot directory) as mentioned before.