Another Ubuntu on external drive question

[Derek Broughton]

I have two laptops that claim to be able to boot from USB (Dell Inspiron and
HP Pavilion pv6000), but neither seems able to find the USB drive from
Grub.  Can anybody help?

I successfully (afaict) installed Feisty on an external USB drive, from the
alternate CD.  The only glitch being that letting it do automatic
partitioning on the drive created two partitions but failed to put a
filesystem on either, so the install failed as soon as it actually tried to
write to the / partition.  I reran with manual partitioning, created an
ext3 (sudden concerns about the value of a journal on an external drive...)
partition and a swap, and everything ran fine until installing Grub (as
expected).

Then I rebooted to my own system, and ran "grub-install /dev/sdb --recheck"
which claimed to be successful (and the map says hd1 is the USB drive).  I
rebooted (first resetting the USB HD to have a higher boot priority in the
BIOS) and it booted to the internal drive.  If I go into grub:
 grub> root (<TAB>
the tab-completion shows only hd0 as an option - so grub doesn't see the
drive (the light is on, but apparently nobody's home :-))

Same situation on the second laptop, same if I install grub to /dev/sdb1.

I've dried adding usb-storage to the initrd - but it seems to me I'm not far
enough into the process to need that anyway.

In absolute desperation, I thought I'd try adding a boot option to the
Windows boot manager (both laptops still have a windows partition).  The XP
one (boot.ini) is probably not impossible, but was too complicated at 11pm;
the Vista boot manager seems impossible to modify!  I really hate
Windows...
-- 
derek