This sounds strange, but my laptop (running 11.2) won’t boot correctly unless my external HDD (ext3) is on and plugged in.
If I don’t turn it on, it hangs at the start of udev. If I press ctrl+c, the system continues to boot, but the keyboard and mouse don’t activate… don’t function, etc. But I can press my power button and it does shut down.
Going through dmesg (during a successful boot with the external HDD on), I saw this (not sure if it is relevant):
2.201029] scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access Ext Hard Disk PQ: 0 ANSI: 4
2.201450] usb-storage: device scan complete
2.206637] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Spinning up disk......
6.062434] udev: starting version 146
6.225262] .
The device sdb1 is the HDD.
Now, I don’t know much about udev. I can tell you that I have no sdb1 lines in /etc/fstab, and I have no autofs references to it. I’m lost… All I know is that I don’t to have to
This normally happens if /boot is on the external HDD; the pointer from the MBR points to the location of GRUB. If GRUB happens to be on an unplugged device, it cannot get any further.
I thought of that too, but /boot is on sda. I’ve found that if I leave the machine long enough, it often boots… eventually.
The hang up definitely occurs when udevd starts. There’s a line, displayed right after udevd says it’s starting, that says something like “loading drivers, configuring devices.”
The machine sorta sits there for a long time…
Then there’s a line referring to device sdb, and references “assuming drive write through.” This occurs even though the drive isn’t turned on, or is even plugged in.
What it appears to me is that the system is attempting to load the device, and the long delay I’m experiencing is a timeout of sorts… udevd is waiting for the device to reply.
But I don’t know much, if anything, about udevd, so I’m a little lost.
No, the external HDD isn’t bootable. It’s simply trying to initialize the device at boot.
Like fstab tells the system to mount disks at boot, it seems udevd is trying to initialize the drive when udev starts.
I don’t know much about udev… I’m wondering if there is some sort of static setting (a mention of this device, sdb) that needs to be removed from a config file somewhere.
I’m new in Linux, so i want to install suse 11.2 in a external hdd,i all ready have it with vmwares but i want to tried it in me external hdd, i was searching in this forum some info but i cant find who to do it so me question is: there are some kind of tutorial to do this?