Hello,

I'm new here to LinuxQuestions, but I think I have a good question for everyone. I currently am trying to install Slackware 10.1 onto an external USB 2.0 hard drive. The problem is that my Dell Inspiron 8200 doesn't support booting to USB in the BIOS. I have successfully booted into MandrakeLinux 10.1 using the external hard drive.

Since my BIOS doesn't support booting to USB devices, I had to create a CD with the kernel I wanted as well as my own custom initrd to rescan the USB bus to find the drive to be the root. Currently I have Slackware installed on the hard drive and I can boot to it (sort of).

Here is my question, when I boot to Slackware 10.1 the initrd does its job and finds the drive like I told it to, but when INIT begins running it finishes rc.mysqld and then just does nothing no root prompt or anything. Then after a few minutes, INIT complains about a process starting too quickly and then says there are no more processes in this runlevel.

How do I get a prompt once I have booted? Also, I have to pass a "nohotplug" argument to the kernel in order for it to boot properly otherwise I get these constant messages from the usb-storage module in like an infinite loop. Has anyone encountered this error?

Thanks for your time.

-Will

In theory, if you just make a boot CD, with just a kernel and boot loader (grub) then you should be set.
Compile the kernel with usb-storage and your USB drivers built-in, then pass the boot option in grub as "root=/dev/uba1" or whatever device your drive is assigned.

Also, you might want to try "chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.mysqld" to skip the mysql deamon if you don't use it.