Hi,

I am a new Newbie,

I downloaded and installed Fedora Core 6 on to a 80 gig USB HD. By the way i have a Dell laptop that allows the BIOS to boot to a USB device.

THe installation of the Fedora went off without an problem. I used all of the default settings in the install. I was to nervous to make an changes in the defaults.

After installation, I restart my laptop and tell the BIOS to boot to the USB device. The monitor screen goes dark, and the curser is sitting on the top left corner blinking at me. That is all it does.

Should i have changed something in the installation defaults to give me Fedora booting up?

Thanks for your time

GP

I don't know much about Fedora but I might try using a live cd to boot the 80 gig drive and then do two things. First, make the Linux partition the active one for that drive and then re-initialize GRUB. My reasoning is this; even though Linux doesn't need an active partition to boot from, your BIOS might be bypassing that partition because it isn't active. Also, there may be a problem with GRUB, so you should check the settings and then do a grub-install to make sure everything's ok. (I assume you're using GRUB) I've noticed a lot problems with the way some BIOSes treat bootable USB devices. Some only say they'll boot from USB, and worse yet, some will only boot DOS or Windows.

Edit: Also, make sure you install GRUB to the boot sector of the device and not the Linux partition.

"I might try using a live cd to boot the 80 gig drive..."

Are you talking about emulating the CD on the drive here, or something else?

It doesn't seem to be as simple as copying an iso to a partition and then booting it. Assuming you have grub installed on the mbr, what commands would you give it to boot the partition that has the image on it (it most likely has isolinux)?

When you get to the dark screen with flashing cursor, have you tried hitting the return key?

I loaded a bootable copy of mandrake to an 80Gb usb hard drive and set the bios to boot from the usb, but the system would only boot AFTER I hit the return key a couple of times.

Just a thought.

marshon

I never thought of that marshon, thanks! As for emulating the cd, fitzov, no, what I mean is that when he gets to the boot prompt of his cd he puts in something like:
BOOT: name_of_kernel root=/dev/sda1 append="options_for_kernel" ro
Now, I know not everything works that way, but it might, so I thought it was worth a try.
He could just reinstall and this time make sure the three things I talked about are in place, too.