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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

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.

I finally solved the problem:

I came to the conclusion that I had probably inadvertantly had
the root device set to hd0 instead of hd1 when I did the
setup command.

To fix the problem I broke into the grub command shell from a
boot and issured:
root (hd1,2) ( set the root device to the linux partition on
usb drive
setup (hd1) ( write the files fix MBR)

After a reboot and setting the usb drive to be the "first" drive
I was able to boot directly from the usb disk to linux.

(Booting WinXP still does not work from the usb drive)

Jerry