[plug] Bootable USB hard drive

[Patrick Coleman]

On 5/10/06, Kev <kdownes at tpg.com.au> wrote:
> Gavin Chester wrote:
<snip>
>
> I figure that I'll have a go along that route, but I eventually want to
> be able to boot from my USB devices.  What I don't understand is, what's
> the purpose of the USB***  selections in the "boot from" list in the BIOS?
>
> During the boot process, the machine does attempt to boot from the USB
> device, but it fails every time.  ie the BIOS is definitely attempting
> to boot from the USB device.  As an aside, I also have a USB CD-ROM, and
> I can't boot from that either.  I've tried 5 different machines, with 4
> different CDs of 3 different OSes.  Once I have a machine booted
> normally, either USB drive mounts ok, and the USB hard drive appears in
> whatever partitioning tool I want to use.
>
> It's all a little too baffling for now methinks  :-)

I havn't been following this thread, and I've never tried to do this,
but here are my thoughts. There would surely be no problem booting the
kernel off a USB; as long as you have the appropriate drivers compiled
in or in your initrd you can boot off just about anything. Most if not
all distros have USB support in the kernel. I also imagine the BIOS is
just going to do a normal boot using a bootloader, just using a USB
device.

So, how about trying this:
 - Find a working debian[-based] system that can mount your drive
 - Format with reiser or ext3 or something and mount
 - Use debootstrap to install a bootstrapped debian system onto the drive
 - chroot into the mountpoint
 - From here run the usual grub commands to get grub onto the drives
boot sector.

If you can get to this point I don't see why it wouldn't work. Only
shaky step I can see would be whether debian has USB modules in the
initrd; you might have to rebuild it. From memory this is mkinitcramfs
- I -think- however reinstalling the kernel on the chrooted partition
will do this for you, and quite possibly in a way that actually works
(my experiances with mkinitcramfs and ubuntu is that it doesn't :).

Once you've booted off the drive the first time debootstrap should
kick in and finish the install onto the drive properly.

-Patrick


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