Hi!

Did anyone around here ever manage to boot Linux from USB on this hardware?

A little more background:

I followed these guidelines: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=426099

My Linux partition is sda3 (30GB) on the end of a 250 GB USB harddisk. Distro is SUSE 10.1, grub is installed to it's MBR and the required usb modules are loaded into initrd.

The Vaio BIOS has an option to boot from floppy disk/external, which is meant to be an external USB drive, as there is no internal floppy drive available. With the HDD attached, the BIOS recognizes it correctly. So I thought (maybe naive?) that I could as well boot from the HDD.

But nothing! The BIOS always chooses the next available boot medium. If I disable all but USB, I get "no OS available"

My ideas:
- maybe it simply doesn't work with this BIOS.
But why does the BIOS mention this option explicitly?
- a USB floppy drive is something completely different from a HDD, so the BIOS doesn't know what to do with it.
- maybe grub wasn't installed properly. I didn't get an error message. How can I check if grub is in the MBR?
- do I have some kind of 1024 cylinder limit? If this is the case, I could move the Linux partition to sda1.

Any ideas from your side? Hints highly appreciated!

abisko00

On my IBM T30 laptop the bios recognises my 20gb USB harddrive as a standard internal harddrive and I boot that way.

Regards