usb hard disk

Bruce Burden brucegb at realtime.net
Thu Feb 1 16:07:19 UTC 2007


On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 04:10:41PM +0100, Zoran Kolic wrote:
>
> Yup. I want my mbr on internal hdd and another grub on external
> usb drive to boot linux. Simply, to let bios to choose from two
> equal disks. Possible?
> 
	Mostly. :-) I have the original disk from my laptop in
   and USB/Firewire enclosure. The original disk has windoze
   and Gentoo, with GRUB on the MBR.

	A new, replacement disk drive is now installed, and is
    FreeBSD only. It has the standard FBSD boot loader.

	When I power on the laptop, I get the ususal F1/F2/F3
    and F5 prompts (three partitions on the internal disk plus
    the USB/Firewire disk).

	Selecting F5 will put me into the GRUB menu, which
    will boot Gentoo. Mostly. I do not believe I have a SCSI
    driver in the Gentoo kernel, so the boot process crashes
    when Gentoo attempts to mount the boot device.

	It is my belief that were I to swap the drives, rebuild
    the kernel, with a SCSI module included, swap the drives 
    back, I should be able to boot Linux from the external drive.

	It is not clear if I can boot windoze, as it should have
    a SCSI driver available to it (although who is to say, given
    the "customized" laptop installations these days), but it
    does not boot, despite my telling GRUB to map ad0 to sd0
    and map sd0 to ad0, which *should* put the windoze drive on
    the first disk, at least as far as windoze knows. This is
    repeated in several sites I have searched, but none of them
    are using the FBSD bootloader initially, so that may be
    confusing things. I suppose I could install the GRUB boot
    loader in the ports, but I am going to "correct" the windoze
    issue with qemu.

							Bruce
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
  "I like bad!"                         Bruce Burden    Austin, TX.
        - Thuganlitha
        The Power and the Prophet
        Robert Don Hughes



More information about the freebsd-stable mailing list