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farproc
August 3rd, 2011, 08:59 PM
I have a PC that has an onboard USB slot.
I have plugged an 8Gb thumbstick into that, and booted the Ubuntu 11.4 server install off of an external thumbstick. There are additionally two SATA drives that are plugged in, but I want to configure later.

Everything seems to be working until setup gets to the "Install the GRUB boot loader on a hard disk" step. Which fails.
Ubuntu installer says:

Install the GRUB boot loader to the master boot record? <Yes>
Running "grub-install /dev/sdd"...
Running "update-grub"...
Installation step failed

I have no choice but to continue with the setup for now, and try and make the usb bootable later. The installer says:


You will need to boot manually with the /vmlinuz kernel on partition /dev/sdd1 and root=/dev/sdd1 passed as a kernel argument.

Any clue as to how I get this system to boot?

---
I have booted it once - I think it found a MBR and Grub on one of the internal HDDs - but I need to get it to boot entirely off of the usb drive as I want to remove the SATA disks at some point.

More worryingly, I tried to
sudo apt-get install gparted
and got this message


Media change: please insert the disc labeled
'Ubuntu-Server 11.04 _Natty Narwhal_ - Release i386 (20110426)'
in the drive '/media/cdrom/' and press enter

Each time I press enter is proceeds to download a few packages, then goes back to asking. Holding down enter to install things is not fun :/
Is installation of Ubuntu server onto usb media just not supported?

While I am doing this via an ssh session the login screen on the box itself keeps saying bizarre things like


[...] sd 7:0:0:0 [sdd] No Caching mode present
[...] sd 7:0:0:0 [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through


I seem to be in way over my head :(

farproc
August 3rd, 2011, 09:51 PM
Problem #1 seems sorted. /dev/sdd is the install usb device, not the boot usb device. /dev/sdc is the boot usb and it seems to be working.

Problem #2 - edited /etc/apt/sources.list and commented out the duplicate "deb cdrom:[Ubuntu-Server..." line from line 5 of the file. After an apt-get update, installs seem fine now.