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Ok, I have the dmesg from my Dell Latitude c400 laptop on which I installed Opensuse 11 live. I installed it from cd on a desktop system I have, onto a laptop hard drive attached via USB.
I have changed the /boot/grub/menu.lst to reflect the hardware as suse sees it. Root being /dev/hda1 swap being /dev/hda2. I know they use a different naming convention now, the /dev/sda thing, but when I use the older laptop, it seems to want to revert back to /dev/hda for the internal hard drive.
If I boot from the laptop hard drive IN the laptop, it says "waiting for /dev/hda1 to appear" when it doesn't see it, it says "want me to fall back to /dev/sda1?". If I say yes there, it will boot from the USB jump drive as /dev/sda1 with swap being /dev/sda2.
I had tried to explain that in a previous post, but might not have been clear enough. I hope the dmesg will help clarify what I mean when I had said before that the USB subsystem comes up before the IDE subsystem, making it where it cant see the root drive (hd0,0) /dev/hda1.
I did try to moount /dev/hda and chroot to it and yast2 from there to reconfigure the bootloader, but it doesn't seem to do any good. Yast hangs after I bring it up and select bootloader.
This is a long one, so please don't think its too many words and move on... like I would normally do... The parts I'm talking about will be in a different color if I can manage it
The USB subsystem stuff is in 'magenta' and the IDE subsystem stuff is in red.
SO! As you can see, the USB subsystem comes up first and the IDE subsystem second. I need that order reversed to be able to boot from the internal hard drive, I think. If anyone has suggestions please help.
Thanks!
Last edited by unSpawn; 09-19-2008 at 01:37 PM.
Reason: Ameliorate w "code" tags.
PLEASE!! do not start a new thread and then refer back to something earlier--I for one will not go back and find the other one.
Second, when posting output of something like dmesg, I would encourage you to post only the portions which are relevant. I'm on a laptop with no mouse wheel, and I can't scroll easily.
Have you set the BIOS to boot the drives in the order you want?
Can you get into Linux?
Do you have a live CD version?
Assuming you can get into Linux somehow, then do fdisk -l to see how the drives are recognized. This will allow you to set up GRUB correctly. See also the "booting" link below.
I'll be home in maybe 2 hours,and I'll check in to see how it's going.
I installed from another computer onto the laptop hard drive. I only refered back to another posting because it didn't seem to help, thus my new post.
I have the bios set as well as I can, it only has options for docking station, internal hdd, and network device boot options, not any options for booting from USB. If it did, I would've put my cd drive on there via USB and booted from it. I have no outside devices but the USB stick on which I also installed Opensuse 11. I can boot from the hard drive, but it will init the USB subsystem first, then it asks about falling back to /dev/sda1 which is the USB drive.
fdisk -l shows /dev/hda1 as bootable active partition. It doesn't show anything about the /dev/sda1 USB drive. When I mount /dev/hda1 and chroot to it, use yast2, bootloader, it hangs. Manually setting it hasn't done any good, unless there is some other config file I haven't thought about.
Main reason I posted as much of the dmesg as I did is just in case someone can see something there that I haven't. Who knows, it might be in front of my face but I'm just not seeing it.
Sorry about the non-scrolling mouse thing, I know how it goes, theres not one on the laptop either.
Thanks for looking at my post despite how it came across to you
If you can boot any live cd or your Suse 11 try and post the fdisk -l. I take it you do not have a internal cd. The reason is to see the partition layout and the drive order.
OK---I'm still a little lost. Where did you install GRUB? If it's on the MBR of the USB drive, then you will need to be able to boot from the USB drive. If you system does not support that, then you will need to put GRUB on the MBR of the internal drive---OR: use the technique wherein NTLDR (Windows) is linked to GRUB. (Search here at LQ for "boot linux with ntldr")
When you ran fdisk -l, was that using a live CD?
I'm a little fuzzy on booting OSes on USB, but I think you have to anticipate how GRUB will see the numbering. But first, you have to be able to get to GRUB!!
To me, the simplest and best thing to do is to put the OSes on the internal drive, and use the USB for shared data.
fdisk -l booting from /dev/hda1, failing, falling back to /dev/sda1, then mounting /dev/hda1 and chrooting to /dev/hda1. It shows /dev/hda1 as bootable etc. Not chrooting to /dev/hda1 and doing fdisk -l it shows /dev/sda1 (USB drive) as bootbale.
No internal cdrom drive, only cable connection for external. I can't boot to anything to install on that laptop, I had to install it from a desktop computer to the laptop hard drive.
I know, its confusing that it would show as sda on one machine and hda on another. Only reason I can imagine this being is the age of the laptop. It was made in 04 if I'm not mistaken and has the latest bios updates which is A12, if that helps any.
No NTLDR on it, its only linux. I've tried installing XP on it, but that had the BSOD on reboot in the laptop.
I've tried dd'ing the image of the iso to the jump drive, but that didn't work. Thinking it would pick it up and install from it... instead it was a kernel panic. I tried just extracting the iso and putting it on the jump drive, booting from /dev/hda1 and falling back to it from there, but again it was a kernel panic.
Oh, installed GRUB three different ways in three different install attempts. To mbr, first partition, and both. No difference in how iTo me, the simplest and best thing to do is to put the OSes on the internal drive, and use the USB for shared data.t inits. It still inits USB first IDE second. If I can reverse that order of init, it would more than likely work.
"To me, the simplest and best thing to do is to put the OSes on the internal drive, and use the USB for shared data." I agree with you pixlleany, it would be nice, but as you can see I'm havin a problem with that.
Lastly, I've tried to install OpenSolaris, Solaris 10, XP, 98se, Slackware 12.1, FreeBSD, I think thats all of them. They all either kernel panic, BSOD, or just some other error (mainly BSD and Unix with other errors. Something like Bad IMG or something)
Ok, tired the chainload and it didn't work. Going to try by uuid now, who knows, maybe it'll work. Oh, and now my jump drive broke, so I have to do all my editing of files from my desktop. I hope the U in uuid is really universal and the same on both the desktop and laptop.
Ok, I tried by uuid this time, same results. I noticed that it wouldn't boot by uuid as the devices werent listed in /dev/disk, because there is no directory called /dev/disk/by-uuid. I cant copy it over from the other computer because it would be pointing to the wrong device in /dev/, so whats the point in having by-uuid if it just points to the device listing in /dev?
You need to slow down and answer some of the questions pixellany asked earlier. Where are you installing grub? I may be wrong here but if you are chainloading grub does not care if it is sda or hda; grub goes by hd0 wheather it is either one. What is the fdisk -l of the drive you are working with? What I am trying to say is that you need to slow down and try one way, stick with it and answer our questions. Be patient,some times it is faster if you go slower.
I've tried the mbr and the root part, in different installs. Which do you think would be better? The part I don't understand is, it boots from the drive, but doesn't see it far enough to boot into it. Does that make since? The laptop bios sees it and linux starts to boot from /dev/hda but when everything starts to initialize is where it starts to have the problems. Oh, I think I noticed something interesting, I have no idea for sure but I'm thinking that the hda or sda naming might be dependent on the arch you use. On 64bit systems and newer Intels it seems to use sda, older chips like P2 or 3 and non 32bit AMDs it seems to use hda. Any connection? I had been installing the 32bit linux from a 64bit dual core machine to the laptop hard drive, I installed it from an older Intel over the last few days and it sees the internal hds on there as hda. No idea, just a thought.
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