Booting from 120 GB USB External Hard Drive

[Luciano Miguel Ferreira Rocha]

On Mon, May 31, 2004 at 01:40:57PM -0400, rab wrote:
> Is there any way to install Fedora to a 120 GB hard drive and boot from 
> it? When I try to install, Fedora does not see the USB drive. How can I 
> get this to work?

When my laptop died for good, I picked the harddisk, bought an USB2 case
and burned a bootable cd with a slightly changed initrd and the kernel
image I used.

I also changed the partition labels so not to clash with any on the local
harddisks.

So my laptop got, in effect, lighter...

Anyway, to create an initrd with usb support for an installed kernel,
either:

* run mkinitrd with option --with-usb

* change /sbin/mkinitrd to force usb
  (change line: needusb="" to needusb="1")

* manually specify the modules
  (script attached)

But I never tried installing on a USB harddisk. I guess you must insert
the necessary modules when the instalation starts (see the script for
which ones).

Regards,
Luciano Rocha

-- 
Consciousness: that annoying time between naps.
-------------- next part --------------
#! /bin/bash
cd /boot
for i in vmlinuz*
do
	V=${i#vmlinuz-*}
	echo "Creating /boot/initrd-$V.img"
	if echo $V | fgrep -q 2.4.
	then
		mkinitrd -f -v --preload sd_mod --preload ehci-hcd --preload usb-uhci \
			--preload usb-ohci --preload usb-storage \
			"/boot/initrd-$V.img" "$V"
	else
		mkinitrd -f -v --preload sd_mod --preload ehci-hcd --preload uhci-hcd \
			--preload ohci-hcd --preload usb-storage \
			"/boot/initrd-$V.img" "$V"
	fi
done