The internal HDD in my Inspiron 1525 isn’t working so I am trying to install Arch on an external HDD, namely a Seagate Video 3.5 HDD.

I tried setting up an MBR/DOS partition table on the drive, untarring the Arch tarball in the root partition and doing the install from there (using the guide on bootstrapping Arch from the wiki), but when I try to boot from the new HDD, I get a “No boot sector in usb device” error. I installed and configured grub properly during the install.

How, if at all possible, can I create a boot sector on this sort of HDD? Thanks for the help.

Hello, hjerte & welcome to LQ.

People usually use the information you give us to help you with your problem. You didn't tell us much. Read this How_To_Ask_a_Question
Particularly, we need to know what you're trying to boot with, what image you're trying to boot, is there UEFI or legacy boot, and are yopu installing, or is there a system there already?

You might like to get a copy of the manual - https://dl.dell.com/manuals/all-prod...nual_en-us.pdf

Why isn't the internal disk working/what is wrong with it?

Here's a link to its manual - https://www.seagate.com/files/www-co...100799402g.pdf


If you are re purposing this disk, you will need to format it & put a file system on it before using it.

In addition, in legacy boot computer BIOS needs to address the first sector on HDD and execute the code there. Your enclosure has USB-SATA interface, are you sure this interface supports legacy boot? I have seen interfaces which do not let thru smartctl commands.

I should add some more info I guess.

I’m using MBR/DOS as my ancient laptop doesn’t support UEFI so I use legacy boot. To clarify, I'm installing Archlinux on the new drive via the process in my original post. Could you please explain what you mean by a boot image, and what I am trying to boot with (do you mean my bootloader?)?

My internal disk is a Seagate 150GB 2.5in SATA HDD. Recently, whenever I install Arch onto it, I get an endless stream of during the install (sorry, I don't really know how to copy everything from stderr into pastebin, I'll send a photo of the error in action). When I try to boot that drive, I would get a "The root
filesystem on /dev/sda3 requires a manual fsck" error and I would have to manually fsck the drive and force rewrite on what seemed like an endless number of sectors (I did at least 30-35 before I gave up), so I got the thought that the drive was corrupted from there. Maybe there is a way to fix it, but seeing as the video HDD has more than triple the storage of my old HDD, I would like to have a go at the new one and see if I can use it.

As for my filesystem, every time I attempted the install I set up an ext2 boot partition, a swap partition and an ext4 root partition.

I ran `smartctl -i /dev/sdc` (/dev/sdc is my external HDD) and I got this. So I guess the USB-SATA interface does let smartctl through. I tried looking up how to check if an interface supports legacy boot but I had no luck; could you please guide me? Would it be worth replacing my old internal HDD with the external one in the enclosure?

Probably easiest solution - replace/swap drives over - & use the menu driven installer program.

https://itsfoss.com/install-arch-linux/

So You're trying to install Arch, and sda isn't partitioned? What are you trying to boot from?

Have you a boot dvd?, usb? There's usually a kety (e.g. F10) that you can press to select a boot option or enter setup.

I got it working now. Here's what I did:

First, according to what a guy on Stack Exchange advised, I got a Bootinfo summary, then ran a Boot repair autofix on the drive - in the process, I disconnected my old malfunctioning drive.

Then I discovered my fstab file was empty (I know I'm dumb, you're supposed to check it after running genfstab during install) so I filled it in using the Gentoo handbook section on fstab as a guide.

Of course, the Boot repair messed up with the perms on the new drive filesystem so I ran , dunno if that was a smart idea or no. Entered chroot, installed and configured grub again and everything's working!

Now, on startup the drive initially doesn't boot, and only does so when I hit F1 to retry boot after it fails. All in all, I'm happy to have it up and running.

Assuming you mean my old problematic drive, I did partition it during the Arch install (if that's what you mean). I had a 256Mb boot partition on an MBR/DOS partition table, along with the swap and root partitions.