After lots of searching I haven't yet found anything that works.

I installed Slackware64 14.1 on a usb hard drive & I fixed up lilo.conf & fstab & ran "lilo". The usb hard drive is the only drive on the computer, booting starts ok loading the compressed kernel, decompressing it, & commences until it halts on a panic because it cannot find "/dev/sda1".

Well, "sda1" will be the usb hard drive after the USB subsystem starts up. I have tried "rootdelay=20" & "rootwait" but it appears to completely pause the boot process; in the case of rootdelay, the usb subsystem didn't get started during the delay. I also tried "usb_storage.delay_use" which of course didn't help.

So, how do I get the root drive mount to happen after the usb subsystem startup is complete?

None of the many posts I've found addresses this particular issue.

FWIW: kernel is huge.s 3.10.17, lilo 24.0, the modules supporting my usb hard drive are in initrd.gz.

Do you have usb storage support built in kernel?

No, it's a module.

You have to have kernel built with these options:
regardless your initrd modules.

Argh! Was hoping there was an alternative to compiling the kernel. Compiling the kernel implies "slackpkg upgrade-all" is out of the question, at least without carefully attending to the menu.

Thank you very much for responding...Bob

If I read you correct, you mean slackpkg upgrade-all will update your kernel as well?
By default, the kernel(s) are blacklisted (see /etc/slackpkg/blacklist around line 13 for more info).

I had the same issue when I installed Gentoo at USB HDD, I can't boot and had to rebuild kernel with above options. Not aware of what "slackpkg upgrade-all" means, assuming something terrible
In Gentoo rebuilding kernel is ordinary operation. make + make modules_install.

"slackpkg upgrade-all" is an online upgrade process to my favorite Slackware mirror. I would either have to recompile the kernel each time it's upgraded, or make sure not to let it upgrade.

In my long ago past, I always customized & compiled my kernel; in this day of a) giga ram & b) b'zillions of kernel options I don't bother. Plus, the target cpu is a low-poweer Atom & how long will that compile take?

This computer will be used for my firewall. Unfortunately, it is single-ethernet & the usb to ethernet adaptor I have is much newer than the "old" kernels that the "packaged" firewalls include. E.g. Devil-linux uses the 3.2 kernel & the adaptor module hasn't been backported that far. So I figured a minimal-install of Slackware (3.10.18 kernel) with a bit of "hardening" will do just fine.

Oh, & I have an old laptop 2.5" drive in a usb case I wanted to use. Oh well...:-)

Cheers...

Kernel blacklist lines are commented in my copy, meaning they aren't blacklisted.

I don't use nvidia or amd/ati binary drivers so update kernels haven't been a problem. Kernel upgrade automatically queues a request to re-run lilo.

Appreciate the comment, tho. Cheers

I once had a problem with booting a (possibly non-Slackware) system from a USB disk, for similar reasons. I recall that I didn't have success with "rootdelay". However, using an initrd created with the "-w [secs]" option solved the problem. I don't remember compiling any module into the kernel and I don't see why this should be necessary -- if they're in the initrd, kernel will be able to use them anyway.

I've never had to compile the kernel to enable booting from a USB hard drive.

If I remember correctly, until recently I used to use the root-delay option to the kernel when booting. This seemed to stop working around about 14.1.

I always do a full install of Slackware.

In 14.1 to get booting from a usb hard drive I created a initrd using these instructions -

The reason why I used /dev/sdb1 is that there is an internal hard drive in most machines I boot from. Obviously, I've got a problem if there isn't a hard drive in the machine I'm starting.

Alex

I've now encountered a problem with booting USB hard drives on a UEFI machine running in legacy mode.I've started a new thread here ->

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...de-4175525891/

bgeer did you ever solve this problem?