Problem booting salix from external disk

[rsal]

I have installed salix14-kde on an external drive and trying to boot from it. However, I get 'kernel panic' during booting since only sda1, sda2 etc are detected and not sdb1 (the external drive). How can this be solved? Thanks for your help.

[gapan]

By "external drive" do you mean a usb drive? If that's the case, it won't work, unless you create an initrd that includes the usb modules needed for booting from a usb drive. Even then, I'm not sure it will work with kernel-huge, you might have to switch to kernel-generic for that and also make sure you include the modules needed for your /boot filesystem.

[djemos]

Or you can install the livekernel 3.2.45 x86_64 or i486 in that external drive. Run lilo. If you know how to do it.
And if you set bios to boot from USB as first device then can boot your system.

[rsal]

By "external drive" do you mean a usb drive? If that's the case, it won't work, unless you create an initrd that includes the usb modules needed for booting from a usb drive. Even then, I'm not sure it will work with kernel-huge, you might have to switch to kernel-generic for that and also make sure you include the modules needed for your /boot filesystem.

Yes, I want to boot from usb drive.
I can point grub legacy bootloader to kernel-generic.
I can use following command to make initrd:

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mkinitrd  ./initrd-2.4.18-19.8.0custom.img   2.4.18-19.8.0custom

Command is from this page: http://www.opennet.ru/docs/HOWTO/Kernel-HOWTO-11.html
How do I "make sure to include the modules needed"?

Or you can install the livekernel 3.2.45 in that external drive. Run lilo. If you know how to do it.
And if you set bios to boot from USB as first device then can boot your system.

I have no problem in setting the bios to boot from usb.
I am using grub legacy. Can I just download and run the txz file from this page (http://people.salixos.org/djemos/salix/ ... -i486-1dj/) to get a kernel in /boot folder? I will have to do this on my hard disk salixos installation. Then I can transfer this kernel image to usb drive and point grub legacy menu.lst entry to it. Am I getting the steps right?

[djemos]

I have no problem in setting the bios to boot from usb.
I am using grub legacy. Can I just download and run the txz file from this page (http://people.salixos.org/djemos/salix/ ... -i486-1dj/) to get a kernel in /boot folder? I will have to do this on my hard disk salixos installation. Then I can transfer this kernel image to usb drive and point grub legacy menu.lst entry to it. Am I getting the steps right?

Since you are using grub, download the txz file on hard disk salixos installation. Then run

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spkg --root=/mountpoint_USB  -i  kernelive_package.txz

where /mountpoint_USB is where usb drive is mounted and kernelive_package.txz is the kernel live x86_64 or i486 downloaded package you want to install.
Then point grub legacy menu.lst entry to kernel image on usb drive.

[rsal]

I followed the instructions above and installed kernelive-3.2.45.smp-i486-1dj.txz. However, it is still not booting. Following is the error:

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kernel panic- not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0)
......

The kernel line is :

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title Salix14-xfce on usb-drive
root (hd0,0)
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb1 ro quiet

"root=/dev/sda1" in the kernel line also does not work.

[djemos]

Since is an external USB disk it is not hd(0,0)
it has to be root (hd1,0) Try this.

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Title Salix14-xfce on usb-drive
root (hd1,0)
kernel (hd1,0)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb1 ro quiet

or this

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Title Salix14-xfce on usb-drive
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb1 ro quiet

[rsal]

Since is an external USB disk it is not hd(0,0) it has to be root (hd1,0)

This is not correct. When I select USB drive from boot menu of BIOS, the grub-legacy loads it as (hd0,0). One can confirm this by going to grub prompt by pressing 'c' at grub menu and typing 'root (hd0,' and then pressing the tab key (for autocompletion) to see all partitions available. Similarly one can type '(hd1,' and press tab to see all partitions available on hd1. I have booted from usb a number of times using (hd0,0) and there is no problem with Debian and Arch linux.

[djemos]

I thought it will work the livekernel but it does not.
So to boot from external disk use the kernel-generic and make an initrd.

[rsal]

Should I install kernel-generic-smp-3.2.29_smp-i686-1 or kernel-generic-smp-3.2.45_smp-i686-3 ?

After that, I think I will need to run following command:

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mkinitrd -c -k 3.2.29-smp -m ext4 -f ext4 -r /dev/sdb1

This command is from README.initrd file in /boot folder.