Installing 9.2 on External Hard Drive

Zakirium · 04-02-2005, 10:01 PM

Hi,
I'm trying to install SuSE 9.2 Professional on an external hard drive. I boot off the CD and everything goes well and after the first CD completes, it then boots off of the external hard drive. After I select to startup off on SuSE normally, I get stuck on the following:

Code:

Waiting for device /dev/sda6 to appear:....... not found - dev nodes

Then it gives aroudn 60 lines of things that go like hdc1 hdc2 hdc3 hdc4 and then ptya1 ptya2 etc. Then it says this at the end:

Code:

Not root device found. Exiting to /bin/sh.

I have two other NTFS and a FAT32 partition on the hard drive. Any ideas? I have installed 3 times and keep running into this problem. THanks in advance for all of you help and support.

Zakir

abisko00 · 04-04-2005, 03:07 AM

What type of HDD is it? USB? You may need to include the required drivers into initrd.

Boot from CD, select 'Manual Installation', load the required drivers (for USB you will need at least usbstorage). Then select 'Boot installed system'. Hopefully you will get into your installation. Then run mkinitrd -m <the modules you just loaded manually> and reboot.
Good luck!

Zakirium · 04-04-2005, 06:56 AM

It is a USB drive, but I'm not sure how to do that. Where do I find this USB driver? I'm new to linux.

abisko00 · 04-04-2005, 07:40 AM

I am no more familiar with the 'Manual Installation' menus, but the should be some point where you can load hardware drivers. There you should find the usb drivers. I guess they are called usbcore, ehci_hcd (for USB 2) and usbstorage. Sorry, but I can't help in detail.

Zakirium · 04-04-2005, 09:53 AM

I'm not sure if that's the problem because the first disk installs onto the usb hd and I can boot up off of the USB hard drive and I get past grub, so I'm think that it must somehow already have drivers, but I may be wrong.

thanks.

abisko00 · 04-04-2005, 10:24 AM

During the installation the modules that arte required to access the USB drive are loaded from CD, then everything is written to this drive. But when you reboot, the kernel and device driver have to be loaded from HDD. This is only possible if the correct drivers are included in initrd. And in order to include these drivers into initrd, you first need to get into your system. And I suppose this is the point where you struggle right now?!

My suggested solution is similar to the installation process: first you boot from the 'uncritical' resource, your installation CD, then you have the tools to load the required drivers into memory. Once you have access to the HDD, you can create the ramdisk.