Slackware install and boot on USB hard-drive

khronosschoty · 04-04-2010, 05:17 PM

I am hoping to find some-one to help me install Slackware on a USB hard-drive and get it to boot.

I get it installed just fine, except, when I go to boot into it, I get a kernel-panic --error message. I am sure its the kernel and that I need to some-how set up a initrd, however, I am a little rusty these days and can not quite seem how to do it.

I have a Western Digital Passport external (USB) hard-drive.

I will joy-in all help, and, I'll keep looking.

P.S.

I can not wait to see Slackware 13, in-part, because, its the first official (Slackware) 64 bit system.

bgeddy · 04-04-2010, 06:48 PM

On my system I can boot from an external USB drive by adding:

Code:

append="rootdelay=20"

to the top of lilo.conf and rerun lilo. This causes lilo to wait while my drive comes up. If I run the generic kernel and need to create an initial ram disk I have to give the following parameters to mkinitrd:

Code:

mkinitrd -k $(uname -r) -f ext4 -r /dev/sdc2 -m ext4:usb-storage:ehci-hcd -w 20

to get it to work. Your parameters will obviously vary to suit your settings however I don't need to run an initrd unless I'm running the generic kernel.

guanx · 04-04-2010, 06:57 PM

Please find pencil and paper to record your error message (as much as possible).

Probable cause: Your partitions have different device names every time. Then mount your partitions with UUID. To mount the root partition by UUID, append "root=UUID=the_uuid_of_your_root_partition". For other partitions, change in the file "/etc/fstab" the device names to UUID=...

The file format of "/etc/fstab" is described by fstab(5) (command "man 5 fstab").