USB Drive Enclosure
Forum: HD Install
Topic: USB Drive Enclosure
started by: Wraithan
Posted by Wraithan on July 27 2006,05:22
Hello,I have searched and googled all sorts of stuff but I have yet to get this to work. What I am trying is to install DSL from my WindowsXP Laptop via a USB Drive Enclosure (takes a IDE drive and makes it an external drive) then move it to my target machine a p166mhz with 64megs of ram.
I can get it to install (I think... haven't been able to load it) but as far as I can tell, the boot loader isn't getting installed to the external drive, so that it hangs on start up. It detects the hard drive and gets past POST... after it lists all fhte PCI devices... where it should start the OS is exactly where it hangs.
I would use a Burnable CD and just install it to the target computer but I have no burnables. I have used GParted to make the hard drive a ext2.
Any ideas? (also no floppy drives of any kind in my house anymore, and no thumb drive.)
[edit=1]
Turns out I wasn't installing to the usb drive but to hdb... which as far as I can tell is a ramdrive that DSL-Embeded makes... so I am going to look into how to get my USB Drive enclosure to load in DSL-Embeded
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[edit=2]
Ok, so I installed VMware and booted up DSL from windows using VMware... connected to my harddrive and installed DSL to it. Now I tried to set the bootloader to lilo and then change all the instances of sda to hda in the lilo.conf but I think I am missing something still. It says to run lilo after editing that file, but I am not sure how to go about that while I am editing it on a different drive and in a VM.
Any thoughts would be helpful...
[/edit]
[edit=3]
After doing a lot of research, it looks like I should install GRUB then configure it when it starts to boot up. I will try this once I get home and let folks (if any care) know how it went.
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Posted by Wraithan on July 28 2006,04:31
Well I guess I have to give up till I get some burnables. Since no one here can help me and I have been struggling with this for a couple days now.
Posted by roberts on July 28 2006,04:53
I have used vmware running on WindowsXP to install DSL onto a pendrive native boot. It worked fine. Whereas Qemu's sandbox approach will only see its attached virtual harddrives. Does your target machine's BIOS even have an option to boot from a USB device? Does it currently boot to a grub menu?
Posted by Wraithan on July 28 2006,04:58
It boots to GRUB now, and it doesn't have the option to boot from USB since it doesn't have a USB port. I take the hard drive out of the enclosure and install it into the computer. My problem comes when it tries to boot up it gets errors due to it thinking it should mount /dev/sda1 when since I moved it to inside the computer, it should mount /dev/hda1 and I have had little to no success playing with the boot loaders.
Posted by Wraithan on July 29 2006,04:20
I just gave in and bought some CD-Rs since my girlfriend found them for 9 dollars for a 50 stack. Installing now to the hard drive, no problems yet and I can't see why there would be any... I am a lot happier with this install method 
.