Help booting a system installed on a USB HD
 

Hello,

I have a Macbook dual booting OSX and Mepis 7. I have a external HD partitioned with a backup partition, a general storage partition, and a partition for Mandriva one 09. I installed mandriva but GRUB failed to install. I want to edit the mepis boot loader to load mandriva but i'm pretty new so I'm not really sure how to do this. I have tried taking the info from the mandriva boot file and adding a loader to the mepis file but when I try to load it, it says it can't find the partition which is sdb5. I will post the mepis loader list but i have to restart to switch systems and I'm on OSX right now. Thanks for any help.

I'm trying to get ubuntu to load on my iMac at the moment. From what I have been reading, the MBR emulation that the Apple firmware provides is just the regular version, not extended. So it can only recognize 4 partitions on each drive.

Since Mandriva is on the fifth partition, perhaps that is why?

rEFIt
 

I use rEFIt to boot linux on my machine, it lets you use as many systems as you like. The problem is that I don't think the USB drivers are loaded that early on in the boot process so it won't let me boot from that system. Also I'm not sure I have my config right to boot the system.