[NTLUG:Discuss] GRUB and USB drives.

[Daniel Hauck]

All these complicated solutions?

His stated purpose is to avoid dinking with the hard drive to avoid 
making someone upset or breaking some policy.

I say pull the drive.  It's an HP laptop.  Should be just one screw 
holding the drive in place.  The other option would be to disable the 
hard drive in BIOS but I wouldn't trust that solution to work.  The hard 
drive can be replaced after the install procedure and everything would 
be just fine after that.


Robert Citek wrote:
> On 09/09/2007 10:28 PM, Steve Baker wrote:
>> I can't figure out what to tell GRUB to make it install a boot loader
>> onto the USB drive that'll boot from the USB drive.  I can boot from a 
>> SuSE Live-CD and run grub - but I can't figure out what to tell it.
>>
>> The USB drive mounts as /dev/sda1  (system partition) and /dev/sda3
>> (user partition).  Both are formatted 'Linux Native'.  The "must not 
>> touch" hard drive is /dev/hda
>>
>> Help!  Thanks!
> 
> This is possible to do.  In fact, I do this quite regularly, except with 
> Debian and Ubuntu.  Here's how I do it:
> 
> 1) use labels.  Instead of using /dev/sd* or /dev/hd*, use LABEL= in the 
> files /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst on the USB drive.  Here's an 
> example from my fstab:
> 
> LABEL=foo  /  ext3  defaults,errors=remount-ro  0  1
> 
> and from my /boot/grob/menu.lst:
> 
> kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-16-generic root=LABEL=foo ro quiet splash
> 
> You can label your filesystems with e2label or reiserfstune.
> 
> 2) to install grub, boot from an install CD, mount the filesystem 
> containing /boot, and then run grub-install.  For example, let's say 
> your USB device is /dev/sda and /dev/sda1 is root with /boot/grub:
> 
> mkdir -p /tmp/foo
> mount /dev/sda1 /tmp/foo
> grub-install --root-directory=/tmp/foo /dev/sda
> 
> If you have a separate partition for /boot (e.g. /dev/sda2), then mount it:
> 
> mkdir -p /tmp/foo/boot
> mount /dev/sda2 /tmp/foo/boot
> grub-install --root-directory=/tmp/foo /dev/sda
> 
> This will install the grub boot loader in MBR of /dev/sda.  All that's 
> left is to reboot without the CD and with the USB drive plugged in.
> 
> Good luck and let us know how things go.
> 
> Regards,
> - Robert
> 
> 
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