Hi all,

I have a hp nx6120 laptop, 1 GB ram with Windows XP Pro.

At my college PC, I booted from the live-CD FC10 and successfully installed it on Micro Arcis 40 GB external USB HDD. Then I booted the college PC into FC10 with the external usb HDD and yummed gcc, g++, openjdk and stuff. Things were going great.

Then, I connected the USB-HDD to my laptop, modified the bootup sequence to boot from "usb hard drive". But the nx6120 laptop is unable to detect the external USB HDD during boot up, it continues booting XP from internal HDD. The external USB HDD works normally once the laptop has booted into XP.

Additionally, I have a 16 GB Transcend USB pen drive,I have done the same steps to install of FC10 on that too. It works great with the same nx6120 laptop!!!!!!!!too. Its only that the life of the pen drive will come down because of all the writes. So I would prefer the external HDD solution.

Then, I suspected that the external USB HDD is not getting enough time or power during bootup and hence it is not being discovered by the laptop's bootup sequence. my bootup sequence is
1. Optical Drive
2. USB HDD ( i see the light on the USB-HDD )
3. Internal HDD
, but it didnt solve the problem either. The laptop would still boot into XP

The external HDD does not have an external power supply, it has the extra USB connector for extra power supply, but it too doesnt help.

I am wondering if i can move grub to a small USB pendrive, then load root filesystem and /home directory from the USB-HDD. Any tutorials for this approach?

Any other suggestions folks ?

Thanks in advance.