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Booting with External USB3 Drive

(11 posts) (4 voices)

• Started 10 years ago by gdesilva
• Latest reply from gdesilva
• This topic is not resolved

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1. 

   gdesilva
   

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   Member

   Hi,

   Has anyone successfully booted Slitaz 4 Cooking using an external USB3 Drive? Tried rootdelay option on grub command line without success.

   Thanks

   Posted 10 years ago #
2. 

   Ceel
   

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   Administrator

   Hi,

   What's the problem exactly ?

   Posted 10 years ago #
3. 

   gdesilva
   

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   Member

   Installed Slitaz Cooking (LiveCD works fine), on an external USB3 drive. Installation was successful. However, I cannot boot from the external drive. In one machine it goes into grub-rescue and in another it claims there is no boot partition. I have Ubuntu 13.04 and 12.04 on the respective machines.

   Thanks

   Posted 10 years ago #
4. 

   Anonymous
   

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   Unregistered

   First, make sure your boot order is correct.

   Does the grub menu list/cfg file & fstab show the correct partition info?

   If you haven't used external usb drives live before, you may find it is addresed as (hd1,0) in grub & maybe /dev/sdb1 in fstab after installing, these need changing to (hd0,0) & /dev/sda1, or equivalent.

   (Also, make sure it is in a usb3 socket, may not respond if in a usb2 socket.)

   Hope this is of help to you

   Posted 10 years ago #
5. 

   mojo
   

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   Key Master

   One possible reason is the USB 3.0 host controller driver XHCI is not compiled in the kernel: CONFIG_USB_XHCI_HCD=m

   Reference:
   http://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/USB_XHCI_HCD.html
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Host_Controller_Interface

   Posted 10 years ago #
6. 

   gdesilva
   

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   Member

   @fatmac, I checked out the menu.lst and device numbers etc and all appear to be OK.

   The other unknown is the fact that I have the device plugged into a USB2 in all cases - haven't got around to installing USB3 on my old machines! Not sure whether this could be an issue?

   @mojo, CONFIG_USB_XHCI_HCD is set to 'm' - in fact, I was hoping this was not the case!

   One other thing I managed to do was to plug the drive into a third old machine running Bodhi Linux (the latest version) and did a grub install on the USB drive. Then I booted from the USB drive and voila it all came alive.

   However, removed the drive and plugged it on to the previous two machines but the USB drive would not boot in both cases.

   Thanks for suggestions - anything else I could try?

   Posted 10 years ago #
7. 

   gdesilva
   

   offline

   Member

   Here's some wierd findings.....

   1. Did a fresh install of Slitaz 4 Cooking on the USB3 drive which is attached to a USB2 port.
   2. Install successful
   3. Reboot the machine and tried to boot off the USB3 drive.
   4. Boot fails - no boot sector found message.
   5. Power off and remove the USB3 drive
   6. Power on and insert the USB3 drive just when the BIOS starts up.
   7. Slitaz boots normally

   I do get an error mounting the FS....

   EXT3-fs (sdb2): error: couldn't mount because of unsupported optional features (240)
   EXT4-fs (sdb2): couldn't mount as ext2 due to feature incompatibilities
   EXT4-fs (sdb2): INFO: recovery required on readonly filesystem
   EXT4-fs (sdb2): write access will be enabled during recovery
   EXT4-fs (sdb2): recovery complete
   EXT4-fs (sdb2): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)

   which I suspect has nothing to do with the booting problem.

   Will try the same method on the other computer and post the outcome.

   EDIT: Unfortunately, cannot replicate the process on the other machine.

   Would appreciate any comments or suggestions. Thanks

   Posted 10 years ago #
8. 

   Anonymous
   

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   Unregistered

   Try putting rootdelay=10 in the grub kernel line.

   Posted 10 years ago #
9. 

   gdesilva
   

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   Member

   @fatmac, that was one of the first things I tried - did not make any difference.

   Posted 10 years ago #
10. 

    Anonymous
    

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    Unregistered

    Only other thing I can think of is that your disk isn't backwards compatible.

    Posted 10 years ago #
11. 

    gdesilva
    

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    Member

    Yes, it appears to be the case. However, the weird thing is it works OK with most Dell machines I have tried but consistently fails in the case of HP machines. Also, I have a USB3 docking station which works (when plugged into USB2 ports) with all the Dells and HPs I have tried.

    Posted 10 years ago #

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