Today I installed Red Hat Linux 9 on my internal laptop drive. I needed the whole 40 GB for a project I am using so I went ahead and got a USB 2 enclosure so that I would be able to boot off the drive externally. My laptop, a Dell Precision M60 supports booting from external USB drives in the bios.
After I start the computer, the USB drive boots into GRUB with the following arguments:
root(hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-8 ro root=/dev/sda2
initrd /initrd-2.4.20-8.img

i changed root=dev/hda2 to root=/dev/sda2 because that is where the drive is mapped to on my linux installation

I also added the following to the /etc/modules.conf
"alias scsi_hostadapter usb-storage"

Then I did a mkinitrd on the intrd file in order to --preload the USB mass storage driver drivers and replaced the initrd.img in the /boot directory.

It all works when internal. Externally, it does not.

I can see that the USB Mass stupport Storage support is registered and initaliazied but then it reports

kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-8, errrno = 2
VFS: Cannot open root device "sda2" or 08:02
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:02

Can anyone help me out? I am really stuck. Is there any way to just install RH9 on the external driove with the anaconda installer?