booting with grub to /dev/sda

[Jim Cromie]

Ow Mun Heng wrote:

>On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 06:33, Jeff Vian wrote:
>  
>
>>On Mon, 2005-01-03 at 13:51 -0700, Jim Cromie wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>when you say 'installed on boot disk', I have several ways to interpret 
>>>that:
>>>1. grub-stage1 is in the MBR
>>>2. grub 1.5 and 2 are in /boot/grub/  (on FC-3 at least)
>>>3. both the above.
>>>
>>>in my case, Ive got extlinux installed to MBR on /dev/sda,
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>I probably should have been more clear.
>>By boot disk, I mean the disk that the bios is reading the MBR from (the
>>boot disk).
>>On your laptop that would likely be /dev/hda,  on the usb device you
>>indicate it as /dev/sda.  If you want to use grub for booting from the
>>usb drive without another drive hosting grub you will likely need to
>>install grub on the boot sector of /dev/sda
>>
>>    
>>
>>>>If I understand your plans correctly, you want this usb drive to be able
>>>>to boot standalone.
>>>> 
>>>>
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>that is the plan.
>>>      
>>>
>
>I believe that what's missing is that you don't have USB support
>compiled into the kernel and not as modules.
>
>I've done it before and it's do-able.
>  
>
I should clarify.  Ive tried 2 different means to my end.

1. booting my laptop, using grub on hda to pull kernel from sda, and 
mount it as root.
Grub is not seeing the drive, whether thats cuz my laptop BIOS wont show 
it, OR
cuz grub is unable to use it.   Naturally, the question is which ?

2. booting my dads computer directly from the usb-drive (the goal).
His box has no grub, but does have a BIOS that will try the usb-drive 1st.
EXTLINUX (new in syslinux-3.00) finds the kernel and the initrd, and 
starts the boot.
(it has an automatic menu-system too, with appendable boot-lines)

wrt recompiling, thats sufficient, but not necessary.
I used mkinitrd --with=usb_storage to make an initrd with the necessary 
modules,
copied that into where extlinux looks.
Now the kernel loads them during boot (so that looks ok),
but still fails shortly afterwards (so Im still missing something)

heres the boot error, starting from the initrd module load:

Loading jbd.ko module
"   ext3.ko   "
"   scsi_mod.ko   "
SCSI subsystem initialized
Loading usb-storage.ko
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
usbcor: registered new
USB Mass Storage support registered.
Creating root device
Mounting root filesystem
mount: error 6 mounting ext3
mount: errort 2 mounting none
Switching to new root
switchroot: mount failed: 22
umount /initrd/dev failed : 2
Kernel panic -not syncing: attempted to kill init

hangs..  CtlAltDel  doesnt clear it.  power cycling does.