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Dual booting with a laptop and external hard drive.
I have an old 200GB LaCie external hard drive, There's nothing wrong with it other than it collects dust. It seemed a good idea to use it as part of a dual boot system with my Fujitsu Siemens AMILO li 3710 laptop that has Linux Mint Debian Edition (32bit) with the Cinnamon desktop, (very nice it is too) installed on it. I had decided that openSUSE 12.3 KDE was the ideal candidate as it adds a nice variety. I used GParted live to make a partition table: 512MiB /boot, 8GB swap, 20GB /(root) and the rest as /home. That was easy enough. I then booted up open SUSE using a Live USB thumb drive and proceeded with installation. All was smooth until I got to mounting the partitions I made earlier. I had to first unmount the partitions for LMDE before I could apply mount points for openSUSE. I thought that this was a little odd, a bit of a chicken and the egg scenario but what the heck, I'll go with the flow. I got the partitions mounted and formated to Ext4 and hit install. It was that Rubicon moment. The LaCie kicked in and the installation went as expected. When asked where to load the Grub boot loader, I loaded it to the 512MiB boot sector of the LaCie I created instead of the MBR. When I rebooted the system, the laptop went straight to boot loader recovery. I'd expected something like this to happen, I thought I'd recover it using a live CD/DVD. Unfortunately this didn't work because the /(root) partition was not mounted. The chicken and egg scenario. I then thought I'd reinstall LMDE over the existing data without the LaCie attached to restore the mount points, That sort of worked but unfortunately I didn't understand the long chain of letters and numbers that were attached to each of the partitions. My very limited knowledge of the command line now failed me. Anyway I threw my toys out of the pram and decided the best course of action was to nuke the hard drive, reinstall and then restore the backup I had made the previous evening. It may not have been the most elegant solution to that part of the problem but it worked a charm and saved a huge amount of time struggling with a more conventional solution. I got all my data back for LMDE and the boot loader was working. The problem I'm left with is, I have a LaCie that according to GParted, has an installation on it I can't access. Also, I can see the drives in my home menu in Mint. All the data is there and in the partitions I allocated. If I try to boot up the system with the LaCie attached, I don't get anything other than a blinking curser; that's it. We already know that the computer will boot from USB because I installed openSUSE from a live USB stick. So that's not the problem. Reboot without the the LaCie and the laptop starts and boots normally. Can any of you good people help me get the laptop and the LaCie working together. If I give up now, I'd just feel I've used up a lot of time and effort and learned next to nothing in the process. Please bear in mind I'm very new to this, so please keep explanations and directions as simple as possible Thanks!!
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It you deliberately make you post(s) hard to read, people won't bother. Remember it's you that's asking for help.
Boot the Mint system and plug in the Lacie, then go here, and download the script. It's actually a tar.gz these days, so run this command before the "sudo ..." step in the instructions. Code:
tar -xvzf bootinfoscript-061.tar.gz |
Quote:
andyinmokum@debimint-li-3710 ~ $ sudo ~/Downloads/bootinfoscript [sudo] password for andyinmokum: sudo: /home/andyinmokum/Downloads/bootinfoscript: command not found andyinmokum@debimint-li-3710 ~ $ I have a feeling that this is not what you are looking for. I've run it a few times and the result is same every time. I hope this helps. Thanks again. |
Ok, let's see what actually there.
Code:
ls ~/Downloads/boo* |
Quote:
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Yes - I'm thinking the extract didn't work because you weren't in the Downloads directory.
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3 Attachment(s)
Quote:
Here are some screen shots of the partition folders on the LaCie. |
Quote:
andyinmokum@debimint-li-3710 ~ $ sudo ls ~/Downloads/boo* [sudo] password for andyinmokum: ls: cannot access /home/andyinmokum/Downloads/boo*: No such file or directory andyinmokum@debimint-li-3710 ~ $ |
O.k. let's find where they went (from a terminal again)
Code:
find ~/ -iname boot* |
Quote:
andyinmokum@debimint-li-3710 ~ $ sudo find ~/ -iname boot* /home/andyinmokum/Documents/Boot Info Script /home/andyinmokum/Documents/Boot Info Script/bootinfoscript-061.tar.gz /home/andyinmokum/Documents/Boot Info Script/bootinfoscript andyinmokum@debimint-li-3710 ~ $ Hi syg00, it is getting late here in Amsterdam. I need to get some sleep. Many thanks for your help so far. May we pick it up again when my eyes are not falling out of my head? I hope the problem can be resolved. I wish you a good night. |
If you're able to boot LMDE try while booted in LMDE run
Quote:
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Explains why it ain't working (different location) - try it as
Code:
sudo ~/Documents/Boot Info Script/bootinfoscriptQuote:
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Quote:
andyinmokum@debimint-li-3710 ~ $ sudo update-grub [sudo] password for andyinmokum: Generating grub.cfg ... Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-686-pae Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-4-686-pae Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-486 Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-4-486 Found openSUSE 12.3 (i586) on /dev/sdb5 done andyinmokum@debimint-li-3710 ~ $ sudo ~/Documents/Boot Info Script/bootinfoscript sudo: /home/andyinmokum/Documents/Boot: command not found andyinmokum@debimint-li-3710 ~ $ I going to reboot the system and see what happens. ....okay that has been done with the LaCie attached. The result was a blank screen with the cursor blinking in the top left hand corner. Rebooted without the LaCie attached and Mint's boot loader screen appeared as expected. |
the bootinfo sript is great for diagnosing problems but seeing that it's a new installation, I would just remove the partitions that were created with gparted on failed install & let Opensuse do the partitioning, but not install a bootloader. Then I would just run sudo update-grub from LMDE & reboot.
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Do this from a terminal
Code:
cd Documents/BootThen try Code:
./bootinfoscript |
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