hi,

(note I am a noob to linux, but learning at a rather quick pace so please bear with me if I dont understand something)

I just purchased a new Fujitsu MHT2040AT external USB2.0 drive. What I am attemping here is to run Windows XP Pro on my main internal drive, thats not by choice, work requires me to leave XP on. So I decided if I cant use SuSE on my main drive I might as well install SuSE on my new external and boot it directly from the usb2.0 drive.

I managed to successfully install SuSE on the drive with GRUB switching between both OSes. The problem is when I try to launch Linux it gives me an entire error about mounting or something like that:

RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem)
Sarting udev
Creatinv devices
Loading kernel/fs/reiserfs/resierfs.ko
Waiting for decvice /dev/sda2 to appear: ....not found -- device nodes:
console fb0 hda hda1 loop0 lopop1 loop2 loop3 loop4 loop5 loop6 loop7 md0 null ram ram0 ram10 ram11 ram12 ram13 ram14 ram15
ram2 ram3 ram4 ram5 ram6 ram7 ram8 ram9 ramdisk tty1 tty2 zero warning: can't open /etc/mtab: No such file or directory
CVS: Cannot open root device "sda2" or unknown-block(0,0)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unkown-block(0,0)

I have not touched any configurations or such, I just finished installing and booting the system for the first time and got that. I'm rather confused as to what to do but this is what I believe is occuring: while I watched the loading process it never even bothered to load the usb features. Since it cant read a usb drive it produces an error that it cant find anything. How do I make this go away and let me work normally on my new system :'(

I've been trying to find some online documentation on this but all I got was this vague article: http://simonf.com/usb/, that are hardly even understand.

Can someone help me make sense of this? Your help is most appreciated!

You need to add the USB modules to the initrd.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/160834

one I do that will it fix itself???

errr I was looking through some of the posts and noticed that I have no clue what they are talking about

I hate doing this but could someone please help me understand the exact steps I should be taking to make the modifications. I sort of understand this article and got it from the link michaelk posted: http://mw-pc-seiten.de/homepage/USB_hd.htm. Although how to I get to the options to actually allow me to make these modifcations???

ahhh I was hoping to have this up and running by tomorrow so that I can start using the OS :'( this is a cry for help lol someone plz