Hello, I've been fiddling with Linux for a while, and the only thing I've gotten to successfully run were some tiny distros and this new one (to me) backtrack 3. I have a usb edition of this thing, and it boots up just fine..though I can't figure out how to have it remeber it's state when I shut it down. Anyway, it has an option to install itself to anything mounted from the usb pen drive, though the little button also says it's not been completely tested.

After quite a many days of fiddling with my horrid lack of space on my IDE hdrives I bought a 500 gig Iomega external. Since I can't figure out some things about fdisk and cfdisk I used a microsoft utility to divide up the drive into two 200gig fat32s and a 10gig ext3. This ten gig portion is where I want my linux distro to run from, and all the other free space I plan to use as storage for the creation of an LFS system...to learn linux inside and out, of course. But! I need a stable install of it to run from a drive that isn't my little usb pen.

I follow the steps of the little install untility, installing the distro to sda1 and writing the mbr to sda. Also, it said to manually copy lilo.mbr to my xp drive and edit my boot.ini file, add ing c:\lilo.mbr="Back Track"...did this. Upon booting, I get the options of xp and backtrack. I pick backtrack and Lilo loads up. I select the only option, backtrack, and it loads through a lot of stuff...ending in this...

md: ...autorun DONE.
VFS: Cannot open root device "801" or unknown-block (8,1)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS Unable to mount root fs on unknown block (8,1)

Everything before VFS: looks like it loads fine. There is a lot more report, but I thought that the parts I included were the only relivant portions. I've done some searching and found a bunch of stuff that makes my brain grind coffee. Anyway, the plot gets thicker...I reboot and load up from my usb pen. BT3 loads up and it's pretty, I go to peek at my external partitions and attempt to access the ext3 first, and then the others...all resorting in this error message.

A security policy in place prevents this sender from sending this message to this recipient, see message bus configuration file (rejected message had interface "org.freedesktop.Hal.Decive.Volume" member "Mount" error name "(unset)" destination "org.freedesktop.Hal")

What the crap does that mean? Did my attempts to install BT3 to it lock me out of my drive?! This is the first time I've gotten lilo to come up, by the way..because it's the firts time I copied lilo.mbr to my main drive and edited it's boot.ini file.

Any feedback is appreciated. Thank you.

I've made some progress. After a little bit of formating/repartitioning dancing I've gotten my external back to sqaure one...I even made a swap which shows I have intent. Anyway, did the install over, didn't move an lilo.mbr file since I'm betting the click through gui install options don't really intend to install to an external sata.

I'm running a beta of Back track 3 I believe, and upon researching today I found out there is a final version of 3...leading me to believe there are updates. I've fixed the access problem from the live usb version I'm able to run, so I think all that I need to do is update some software.

I've seen the problem other places though, and they talk about modifying some intrd file or some such, an initial ram disk image is what it is I think. So...I'm going to check other places and keep on chugging along.

Is anyone familiar with adding this type of support (sata external usb hard drive, not portable) to a ramdisk image? What exactly is that? recompiling a kernal? Would kernal patches be advised?

These are all questions I'm wondering. I'll keep researching.