I have installed OpenSuse on an external USB hard drive and it kind of works. The problem is that very frequently (say, every second time) I need to start in fail safe mode or it hangs (it always works in safe mode though). I noticed that in fail safe mode, the file system (ext4) is always recovered and while I am not absolutely sure that a file system problem is the reason for the boot up crash it seems possible. I have tried searching the output of dmesg command for problems, but I could not find anything helpful there.
My first question is whether there are some best settings for mounting/un-mounting an external usb hard drive on which the root partition is? Can I perform file system scan in the normal mode always although that seems more as a work-around than a solution? As the opensuse runs in normal mode from time to time perfectly well, especially after a restart from safe mode, is it possible that the ACPI setting is causing the crash and how can I check that? When it crashes I could do nothing as there is a black screen and I have to restart it using the hardware power on/off button.
Installation to an external USB HD is far from ideal IMO. I certainly wouldn’t waste my time doing it.
The issue you describe sounds ACPI related, which is why failsafe would work.
You can manually add the arguments individually to the normal boot to see if just one or other combination is helping. (I assume you understand that comment)
If you want to scan the USB partitions. Boot Parted Magic and use the partition editor, which can check partitions.
After some experiments, it turned out to be an intel video driver problem with my hp pavillion dv6 notebook. ACPI=off is a solution to it, although a harsh one, so I am now using the “nomodeset” kernel option which is still not perfect as it picks wrong screen resolution, but preferable to turning the entire acpi functionality off.
Well whether external usb or not those hardware issue will not go away but with an external install … lets just say it adds more fun to the user’s experience lol!
Installing on an external drive has its pro’s and con’s so in the end it’s what suites you best. By the way check this site if you want install on an external drive such as usb.