External hard drive prolems
 

So I have this old sub-notebook that I am trying to put ubuntu onto. it doesn't have any external drives so installing linux is a little difficult. My plan was to put the laptops hard drive in an ext enclosure and then install linux onto while it is attached to my desktop. The problem with this is that during installation Ubuntu mounts the hard drive as sd1(??or sda can't remember.) and when I put the hard drive in the laptop it tries to mount a hard drive that is no longer sda(sd1?) instead of hda(hd1??) I tried changing the mount settings in fstab but that didn't work... Does any one have any other brilliant ideas.... I am so close I can taste the linuxieness... yumm

You need to edit your lilo.conf (lilo) or menu.lst (grub) files to specify the root partition that Linux will boot from. An option is passed to the kernel at boot which tells it which partition is your root partition. You need to edit this option as well as /etc/fstab.

I'm not sure which bootloader Ubuntu uses, but locate the configuration file (whichever one it is)...

...if it's lilo.conf, then change the line "root = /dev/sda1" to "root = /dev/hda1", rerun lilo, and try it.

...if it's menu.lst, then change the kernel option "root=/dev/sda1" to "root=/dev/hda1", and try it.

Make sure you change /etc/fstab as well so that all /dev/sda* devices are /dev/hda*.

That ought to work...