Laptop Compaq 8510p with
1) WD My Passport 750 GB external hdd with a usb 3.0 and usb 2.0 compatible cable with opensuse 11.4.
2) Generic ide type 60 GB external usb hdd, also with opensuse 11.4
I loaded opensuse 11.4 on the Passport drive, but when I rebooted, the laptop does not see the usb hdd.
To check the Passport hdd, I booted my desktop with it and opensuse 11.4 loaded fine.
I have been using the second usb hdd which loads opensuse 11.4 fine on this laptop, and still does.
I was thinking it might be a BIOS problem and found what I think are the relevant settings:
SATA Native Mode: Disabled
USB Legacy Support: Enabled
USB HSS Translation Mode: LBA Assisted
USB Key Provisioning Support: Disabled
What do I need to do to get the Passport hdd to boot using the laptop?
Thank you
The ability to boot from an external hard drive requires that you do a couple of things…
- You must have the ability to select in your BIOS setup, the external hard drive to boot from.
2, During the install of openSUSE, you must direct ALL of openSUSE & grub to install on the external hard drive AND select the external hard drive as being the first boot drive in the installation section.
openSUSE, can not know the intended boot order when not based on actual hardware order. The hardware boot order is used by the install section as the drive boot order. The boot drive is always designated as HD0 in your device.map & grub menu.lst file. Before you do the install, you would want to see that the boot order had the external drive first and that all of openSUSE and grub are being installed onto the external hard drive. Failure to understand these issues will result in a booting problem. Often openSUSE may be installed onto the external drive, but because the boor order was not modified, grub is loaded on the internal hard drive and sometimes the resulting system will not boot at all or only boot when the external drive is install. You want to end up with a system that will boot openSUSE entirely from the external hard drive and that your internal hard drive will boot normally when the external hard drive is missing. Again, it all starts with what you can do with the PC BIOS and designating the external hard drive for booting.
Here is more wisdom on hard drive partitioning.
Each hard drive can have up to four PRIMARY partitions, any of which could be marked active and bootable. No matter what you might hear, only one of the first four primary partitions can be booted from. That means you can boot from Primary partitions 1, 2, 3 or 4 and that is all. In order to boot openSUSE, you must load openSUSE and the grub boot loader into one of the first four partitions. Or, your second choice is to load the grub boot loader into the MBR (Master Boot Record) at the start of the disk. The MBR can be blank, like a new disk, it can contain a Windows partition booting code or generic booting code to boot the active partition 1, 2, 3, or 4. Or, as stated before, it can contain the grub boot loader. Why load grub into the MBR then? You do this so that you can “boot” openSUSE from a logical partition, numbered 5 or higher, which is not normally possible. In order to have more than four partitions, one of them (and only one can be assigned as extended) must be a extended partition. It is called an Extended Primary Partition, a container partition, it can be any one of the first four and it can contain one or more logical partitions within. Anytime you see partition numbers 5, 6 or higher for instance, they can only occur inside of the one and only Extended Primary partition you could have.
What does openSUSE want as far as partitions? It needs at minimum a SWAP partition and a “/” partition where all of your software is loaded. Further, it is recommended you create a separate /home partition, which makes it easier to upgrade or reload openSUSE without losing all of your settings. So, that is three more partitions you must add to what you have now. What must you do to load and boot openSUSE from an external hard drive? Number one, you must be able to select your external hard drive as the boot drive in your BIOS setup. Number two, you need to make sure that the external hard drive, perhaps /dev/sdb, is listed as the first hard drive in your grub device.map file and listed as drive hd0. I always suggest that you do not load grub into the MBR, but rather into the openSUSE “/” root primary partition which means a primary number of 1, 2, 3 or 4. If number one is used, then that will be out. You will mark the openSUSE partition as active for booting and finally you must load generic booting code into the MBR so that it will boot the openSUSE partition. I suggest a partition like this:
- /dev/sda, Load MBR with generic booting code
- /dev/sda1, Primary NTFS Partition for Windows
- /dev/sda2, Primary SWAP (4 GB)
- /dev/sda3, Primary EXT4 “/” openSUSE Partition Marked Active for booting (80-120 GB)
- /dev/sda4, Primary EXT4 “/home” Your main home directory (Rest of the disk)
<OR>
- /dev/sdb, Load MBR with grub
- /dev/sdb1, Primary SWAP partition 4 GB
- /dev/sdb2, Primary EXT4 “/” openSUSE Partition (60-120 GB)
- /dev/sdb3, Primary EXT4 “/home” Your main home directory (Rest of hard disk)
Thank You,