Problem booting from external USB HDD that was created from a Vbox image
 

Hello all, playing around with slackware current on a Vbox I created a raw image (using vboxmanage utility) and copied it (using hdd raw copy tool) to a usb hdd. Purpose is to create an external hdd with current and upgrade it reguralry until current becomes the new stable version.

There are other methods also, I just wanted to explore this possibility, to create a Vbox machine and copy it to an external disk to boot from it.

My problem is that when booting from this usb hdd, although at the boot time it seems to correclty load the lilo configuration (and I choose the 4.19.84 generic kernel) in the process it seems to use /sda1 disk to continue and not /sdb1. On /sda1 I have the stable 4.14.157 kernel. Then when the logon screen appears, the keyboard and the trackpoint of my laptop do not work. It is like the system does not have a keybord and a mouse.

I have edited fstab and lilo.conf for /sdb1 to point to this disk, sdb1. Also an initrd was created with many modules in addition to the ones created in the Vbox:

mkinitrd -c -k 4.19.84 -f ext4 -r /dev/sdb1 -m usb-storage:xhci-hcd:uas:ehci-hcd:uhci-hcd:ohci-hcd:hcd:ehci-pci:xhci-pci:usbhid:sdhci:xhci-pci:squashfs:hid:hid-lenovo
:ext4 -u -o /boot/initrd.gz

Basically the problem is that I can not see the messages at ipl because I need to reboot laptop at that point again. Any hint on that would be greatly appreciated.

Regards, Apostolos.

Very sorry for this, just found what happened. It was the initrd!!! It was wrong and I found it out just after I copied to the above post :)

Apparently there was a space between hid-lenovo and :ext4 ...