[TriLUG] booting an external disk with grub 0.97

[Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG]

On Mon, 20 Apr 2015, Alan Porter via TriLUG wrote:

> On 4/20/15 9:38 PM, Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG wrote:
>> I boot and the machine boots off the 3.5.3 kernel on the external disk 
>> (as I expect), and then mounts the internal disk (which I don't want), 
>> which also has an /dev/sda3, as the root partition.
>
> It sounds to me like grub is doing its job.

I've been at this on and off for a couple of weeks now and I haven't found one 
reference with google to booting a whole disk with grub 0.97. I've been booting 
disks with fried mbrs off a kernel on a usb drive for so long now, that I 
assumed it would be trivial to have the whole file system on a usb drive.

Maybe you have to use grub2 or ISOLINUX to boot a whole external disk.

> However, there is some ambiguity about which disk is sda.  That's not 
> unexpected in cases like this... you can't count on the enumeration provided 
> by the storage drivers.

hmm. The kernel can only find /dev/sda - the internal drive (but no /dev/sdb). 
Presumably the drive-by-label and drive-by-UUID entries are produced at the
time as the /dev/sdX device name?

> Can you change the kernel command line so that it uses a UUID or a label to 
> identify the intended root partition?

let me have a go in the morning. my brain is fried right now.

Thanks

Joe

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Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) austintek (dot) com - azimuthal equidistant
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