[fedora-arm] Is it possible to boot Samsung Chromebook from USB 3 external hard disk?

[William Cohen]

On 08/25/2013 06:54 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 01:43:57PM +0200, Marcin Juszkiewicz wrote:
>> W dniu 08.08.2013 15:11, Richard W.M. Jones pisze:
>>
>>> I can't find any documentation that says that the Chromebook
>>> definitively cannot boot from USB 3.0 or from external HDDs.  (Also it
>>> doesn't work when the same disk is plugged into the USB 2 port).
>>
>> Once you enable USB and SD boot ("crossystem dev_boot_usb 1" or sth like
>> that) you are able to boot from internal eMMC (Ctrl-D) or SD (Ctrl-U) or
>> USB 2.0 port (also Ctrl-U). U-Boot stored in SPI flash does not have
>> support for USB 3.0 port.
>>
>> But you can boot kernel from eMMC with rootfs on USB 3.0 hard drive.
> 
> The hard drive doesn't boot, even when on the USB 2 port.  It
> seems this cannot be done, so I've now arranged it to load
> the kernel from flash and mount the root disk from the hard disk.
> 
> Rich.
> 

Hi Rich,

I have been able to use a 32GB Lexar usb 3.0 flash drive on the usb2 port to boot the chromebook.  

Could the problem with the hard drive be due to power? Is it just the hard drive on the usb port or are there multiple devices off an unpowered usb hub?  I did have to get a powered hub for my configuration because the usb hard drive and the usb-ethernet adapter seemed to draw too much power for the chromebook usb2 port.

-Will