USB booting :: Installing on one and booting on another...

I booted dsl on one (old) computer and then installed a hd install to a usb. Then when I try to boot, my grub that's already installed on that computer can't find the device. Even if that's wierd that isn't what I want. I plugged the usb in on another computer (laptop) and then booted. Grub came up (and I got a windows bootloader on the MBR of the harddrive). Then when I booted the kernel tells me that I've specified the wrong device (root=/dev/sda1, VFS: cannot mount fs on 08:01)

I've tried with different devices but I always get the same error message (except the device changes)

I've been trying to solve this for almost 24 hours and I cannot make it work. Please help.

Is this a pendrive? If so, I would not recommend a hard drive install, but instead use the usb pendrive installs either USB-ZIP or USB-HDD from the menu. This will use syslinux boot loader which should make for a better experience to move about machines. The machines will have to be able to boot from usb and the bios boot order needs to specify usb boot before hard drive, or ...

Thanks that solved it!!

But is it possible to have multiple partitions and maybe not fat32 /16 (don't know which it is...)?

I want to install another linux distro on it, and I just wan't to have a working kernel compiling and setting up development enviroment...

original here.