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Re: Booting a USB hard drive



On Monday, May 09, 2011 10:25:44 am Camaleón wrote:
> On Mon, 09 May 2011 09:02:45 -0700, Peter Bonucci wrote:
> > On Sunday, May 08, 2011 10:17:47 pm Klaus Wolf wrote:
> >> I think that this is not a debian related problem, The BIOS of your
> >> Laptop has to bi figured to use the USB-Drive for boot.
> > 
> > The BIOS of this computer boots from all of my other USB drives.  The
> > problem is this particular drive model (Western Digital My Passport
> > Essential.)
> > 
> > Booting a USB drive when the drive and computer don't cooperate is an
> > old problem.  People solved it under Debian years ago.  I just don't
> > know how they solved it and search engines didn't help.
> 
> There shouldn't be any mistery for this. If the BIOS is capable of
> booting from a USB device but the drive where Debian has been installed
> is bypassed by the BIOS, I would check that:
> 
> 1/ GRUB is installed into the MBR of the USB disk.

I believe I did this while installing Debian on the USB drive.  How can I 
verify it?
 
> 2/ Partition where "/boot" is installed is marked with the bootable flag
> (if there is no dedicated partition for "/boot", then "/" should be the
> one to be marked).

Already done.  The "/" directory is marked boot.

> 3/ The system can be properly booted from an external source (i.e., using
> a LiveCD of SuperGrubDisk).

The laptop boots from its own hard disk.  

Under SuperGrubDisk, "List devices/partitions", Grub doesn't see the USB 
drive.  None of the other options boot the drive.
 
Selecting the experimental USB support doesn't seem to change anything.

> Greetings,

Thank you for your help,

Peter


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