Hey everyone,

I'm trying to get a Slackware installation to boot from my Western Digital MyBook external hard drive. As a test, I went in and installed everything from /a, and installed LILO to the external drive itself. Then upon booting, I select from my BIOS to boot from that drive, but I then get nothing but a string of 9's.

After Slackware installed, I also mounted the second CD and installed the modules for huge26.s. I'm kind of at a loss of what to do from here, information on this seems scattered and very distro-specific.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The string of 9's is an error code issued by lilo. I think you have not set up lilo properly. Where did you install lilo ?

Try this ... boot from your 1st CD and do something like

huge26.s root=/dev/sda1 noinitrd ro

change sda appropriately and see if it boots. If not then it means your huge26.s can't detect your external.

If huge26.s cannot detect your external HD and it is USB you could try a boot cd http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...+boot+cd+howto

Samac

huge26.s should be able to detect it, as when I use that kernel in setup I can CFDISK that drive. I'm wondering if that drive doesn't spin up fast enough for LILO to catch it.

I ended up getting a second hard drive today, but I'm still going to tinker with this. I'll post more when I give it a try, thanks for the suggestions!

that is immaterial. You use cfdisk after all modules are loaded. You need to be able to detect external without any modules. If you need modules you will need a initrd.


Best thing I will say is to compile your own kernel ... what you are trying to do shouldn't be hard at all.