installing Etch to a USB drive

[fraz <fraz@unimail.com.au>]

I am trying to install amd64 Etch using the beta 1 release installer 
onto an 80Gig USB 2.0 Hard Drive. It goes pretty well, the drive is 
picked up at /dev/sda and installs happilly.

Unfortunately it won't boot, and the kernel prints this message:

/sbin/init: 432: cannot open dev/console: No such file
Kernel panic - not syncing: attempted to kill init!

I don't know what's wrong. The computer can boot USB drives. But i'm 
booting using grub on a floppy to load the kernel. Could it be that it 
can't mount the filesystems properly?

Thanks!