Hi. I made a bootable USB key for Puppy 2.12. I played around with it and figured I want to keep it permanent, so I want to install it to my USB HDD. I made a 40 GB ext3 partition (I know, it's more than enough). So, I booted up Puppy with my USB pen drive, clicked start>setup>Puppy universal installer. I noticed that the USB Hard Drive option was not implemented yet so I just went with the USB Flash Drive option (I figured, there's really no difference, I just need to tell the wizard where I want my root to be). I pointed my root to /dev/sdc3. I went through the wizard with no problem. Then I went to start>control panel>grub bootloader config; went through the process and installed it to my external HDD MBR. I rebooted, the GRUB menu showed up, and selected 'Linux (on /dev/sdc3)'. It says ".....loading kernel modules.." or something to that extent for a while, then underneath that I get a kernel panic error. I don't remember the exact error message but it was something like "not sync..unable to mount root fs on unknown block-0,0".

I was able to install Ubuntu 6.06 to my external USB HDD, and I would get an error like this; I remember something about delaying mounting the USB drive so it can load the USB modules (makes sense), but I forgot how to do this. Was this delay option in GRUB or within the kernel? How can I load the USB modules before it attempts to mount my USB drive?

usb hard drives have to "get up to speed" when the computer turns on. so edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add
this will give the kernel 8 seconds to detect your root partition