Hi,

I would like to be able to boot from my external USB hard drive. When I include the external drive in the boot device list on my BIOS, the various flavours of Fedora Linux I have installed (on my IDE and USB drives) give the error:

i8042.c: Can't read CTR while initializing i8042

when the kernel boots. The rest of the boot sequence appears ok, but the keyboard and mouse (both PS/2) do not respond when boot is finished. WinXP (on the IDE drive) is unaffected by adding the external drive to the boot device list, and when I remove it from the list, Linux boots OK again (but obviously not from the USB drive).

I tried adding usb-handoff to the kernel line in GRUB as suggested here
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1847345
but this made no difference.

System info:
------------------------------------------------------------------
Motherboard is AsRock K7S8X, BIOS version P2.20


# uname -rpiov
2.6.23.15-80.fc7 #1 SMP Sun Feb 10 17:29:10 EST 2008 athlon i386 GNU/Linux


# /sbin/lsusb -v [irrelevant output omitted]

Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0bc2:3000 Seagate RSS LLC
Device Descriptor:
bLength 18
bDescriptorType 1
bcdUSB 2.00
bDeviceClass 0 (Defined at Interface level)
bDeviceSubClass 0
bDeviceProtocol 0
bMaxPacketSize0 64
idVendor 0x0bc2 Seagate RSS LLC
idProduct 0x3000
bcdDevice 0.00
iManufacturer 1 Seagate
iProduct 2 FreeAgentDesktop
iSerial 3 6RY1PMM5
bNumConfigurations 1
Configuration Descriptor:
bLength 9
bDescriptorType 2
wTotalLength 32
bNumInterfaces 1
bConfigurationValue 1
iConfiguration 5 Config0
bmAttributes 0xc0
Self Powered
MaxPower 0mA
Interface Descriptor:
bLength 9
bDescriptorType 4
bInterfaceNumber 0
bAlternateSetting 0
bNumEndpoints 2
bInterfaceClass 8 Mass Storage
bInterfaceSubClass 6 SCSI
bInterfaceProtocol 80 Bulk (Zip)
iInterface 4 Interface0
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x01 EP 1 OUT
bmAttributes 2
Transfer Type Bulk
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0200 1x 512 bytes
bInterval 0
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x81 EP 1 IN
bmAttributes 2
Transfer Type Bulk
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0200 1x 512 bytes
bInterval 0
Device Qualifier (for other device speed):
bLength 10
bDescriptorType 6
bcdUSB 2.00
bDeviceClass 0 (Defined at Interface level)
bDeviceSubClass 0
bDeviceProtocol 0
bMaxPacketSize0 64
bNumConfigurations 1

if you read the vanilla kernel documents you may notice i8042 is concerned with the keyboard and mouse.....and it makes sense if you have an error that hardware that depends on that driver will fail.

but your real question is how to boot an external usb drive....and it is not clear to me that you have a bootable drive.

1) can you report that this usb drive boots with a friend's computer pls

otherwise suspect that your kernel does not have the relevant drivers inbuilt.

some have to be inbuilt and include the file system format, usb storage, scsi or inside the initrd

2) a number of live cds offer ready made tools to create usb drive systems.

puppy springs to mind...and i think DSL

Hi

thanks for your reply. I was unable to look at this for a while because of work and other things, so apologies for the delay.

To clarify, the i8042 error message does not come up only when I boot from the USB drive. It also comes up when I boot from my internal IDE drive, with the USB drive listed in the BIOS settings as a possible drive to boot from. This is true even when the USB drive has a lower boot priority than the IDE drive and/or no USB drive is inserted. The error only goes away when I remove the USB drive entirely from the boot device priority list in the BIOS.

So my question is not about creating bootable USB drives, but about getting my current install on the internal drive to cope with them. I could leave booting from USB switched off, and switch it on only when I want to use it, but that's a bit of a hassle. It also means I cannot go through with my original plan of copying a partition from my internal to my external drive, and booting from the external drive that way, as this caused the same error.

thanks

openSauce

see if these solutions help
http://cjf.se/wiki/index.php/Linux:_solutions_to_errors