jerry.levan@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi
> I have an HP DV4000 laptop. I recently got another disk and a usb
> enclosure.
> I cloned the new drive (located in the usb enclosure) and then swapped
> the
> drives so that the new (faster) drive was in the laptop and the old
> slower
> drive was in the usb enclosure. The laptop bios sees both of the
> drives,
>
> When I went into bios an made the usb drive the "first" drive. The menu
> on the usb drive appeared but selecting an item would cause a boot
> failure (because the initrd had no support for usb...) After I
> researched
> the problem via google I was able to create the initrd with the
> appropriate
> resources and I could boot directly from the usb drive. After about a
> day
> something failed or I screwed up and attempting to boot directly from
> the
> usb drives would fail, the only thing that would appear would be ther
> word "GRUB".
>
> I *can* boot the usb drive from the internal drive by setting the root
> device
> to point to the usb drive and have the appropriate kernel and initrd
> specified.
>
> The way it stands now if both drives are active and the usb drive is
> "first" in
> the boot list grub will come up but it uses the menu from the internal
> drive
> an the root device is set to the usb device,
>
> If I disable the internal drive in the bios and attempt to boot, I get
> an
> immediate "Disk Geometry Error". ( which probablely explains the
> behavior in the previous paragraph,
>
> I have tried to use the setup command in grub to reset the mbr on the
> on the usb drive, It generates no errors but does not solve the problem
>
> Any suggestions would be appreciated.
>
> Jerry
>
Perhaps syslinux would be a better choice in this case. I don't think grub was designed for this application.