Install Grub to MBR on bootable USB HDD

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I have an HP Media Centre PC m7170n with an ASUS P5LP-LE motherboard that allows me to boot from any USB port including my 500GB USB HP Personal Media Drive.

I have Windows XP installed on the primary SATA HDD.

I seemed to successfully install OpenSuse 11.0 on my HP Personal Media Drive. However, during the installation setup, I could not figure out how to install GRUB to the MBR of my USB drive “sdb1”. The only option to install grub to the MBR was to use “sda1” which was my primary windows HDD. So…I just chose to install GRUB to the root partition instead.

Prior to this installation I was unsuccessful in trying to install Ubuntu 8.04.1 and Fedora 9. Both of these OS’s would not recognize my SATA HDD or USB HDD configurations on this PC.

I then successfully installed Vector Linux to the USB HDD and was able to write LILO to the MBR on this drive. However, VL would never startup properly so I then tried installing OpenSuse. OpenSuse recognized all my drives and the installation went pretty smooth except for the installation of the boot loader.

I tried running Super Grub Disk to overwrite LILO and install GRUB but it either did not work or I did not know how to use it properly…probably the latter.

If I try to boot this USB HDD LILO still comes up, or partially comes up, but of course it’s not configured to boot openSuse.

My questions is: How can I install OpenSuse and the GRUB boot loader onto my bootable USB HDD( HP Personal Media Drive ) so I don’t have to mess with dual-booting or my Windows MBR? When I want to run Linux I just want to plug this “sucker” in and go :slight_smile:

2

Have a gander here
Installing SuSE on External USB Drive - openSUSE

and browse here: GRUB Boot Multiboot openSUSE Windows (2000, XP, Vista) using the Grub bootloader.

3

Thanks for your reply,

I forgot to mention that I have a Pentium D so I used the openSUSE-11.0-GNOME-LiveCD-x86_64.iso install CD.

I had seen the first link you posted. I was a little confused about what was described under the “installation” paragraph on that page. I initially expected to see a selection item on the install startup screen that said “Boot Installed System” but there wasn’t any. Then I decided to go through the whole installation again thinking that I was supposed to make a change in the “other” options of the boot parameter screen. I forget what actually happened but there was no change to my install. What is your interpretation of this paragraph?

The second link is steering me towards using the MBR of the primary windows drive which is what I am trying to avoid. Unless I misunderstood what it said.

Thanks for the help :slight_smile:

4

I resolved this issue in Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 5. I had the same problem there and posted a message on thier forum. One post said that bootable USB drives become known as (hd0,0). When I edited the Grub menu and changed the entry to point to (hd0,0) instead of (hd1,0) I was able to boot into Ubuntu fine.

I expect that if i had done the same thing with my OpenSUSE install this would have worked as well. If you have a similar problem give this a try.

Goodluck :slight_smile: