siabost
March 22nd, 2014, 04:13 PM
Hi,
I had a 5-year old 2.5" exlaptop spinning SATA Hard Drive kicking about so I bought a cheap (£7) External Enclosure for it to turn it into a USB2 External Drive. The enclosure is a Dynamode USB-HD2.5S-BN.
The idea was to use it as a secondary boot device, so I loaded Ubuntu 13.10 64bit on it, in the usual manner, ensuring that grub was installed to the external drive (sdb). The installation boots fine sometimes, showing the grub menu for a few seconds and showing a menu entry for the OS (also Ubuntu) that's on the internal Hard Drive. Other times I get a "grub" prompt or a "grub rescue" prompt or sometimes nothing at all.
When I've had the "grub rescue" prompt I've run the following to get a successful boot:
set prefix=(hd1,1)/boot/grub
set root=(hd1,1)
insmod linux
linux (hd1,1)/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb1 ro
initrd (hd1,1)/initrd.img
boot
Then I ran from Terminal:
sudo update-grub
But the external Hard Drive boot up remains as unreliable as ever.
fstab reads as follows:
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# / was on /dev/sdb1 during installation
UUID=0ea953b2-748a-449d-88c4-6db77d862b02 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home was on /dev/sdb5 during installation
UUID=0442794e-7b2f-4e34-9049-48bef45cfde1 /home ext4 defaults 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=a885107b-69a3-4ec0-912c-153521ab15fd none swap sw 0 0
# swap was on /dev/sdb6 during installation
UUID=da09b9fa-a9ec-47e2-84be-9a6c8a3c9638 none swap sw 0 0
Could it be that sda and sdb rederences are getting mixed up between the drives? If so, how do I stop this happening? Can the drive references sda & sdb be changed to fixed UIDs?
NOTE: Before installing Ubuntu on the external drive I tried SolydX 64bit and I don't recall the same problem, although I didn't run that very long. SolydX is based on Debian with an XFCE Desktop.
Many thanks in anticipation :-)
I had a 5-year old 2.5" exlaptop spinning SATA Hard Drive kicking about so I bought a cheap (£7) External Enclosure for it to turn it into a USB2 External Drive. The enclosure is a Dynamode USB-HD2.5S-BN.
The idea was to use it as a secondary boot device, so I loaded Ubuntu 13.10 64bit on it, in the usual manner, ensuring that grub was installed to the external drive (sdb). The installation boots fine sometimes, showing the grub menu for a few seconds and showing a menu entry for the OS (also Ubuntu) that's on the internal Hard Drive. Other times I get a "grub" prompt or a "grub rescue" prompt or sometimes nothing at all.
When I've had the "grub rescue" prompt I've run the following to get a successful boot:
set prefix=(hd1,1)/boot/grub
set root=(hd1,1)
insmod linux
linux (hd1,1)/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb1 ro
initrd (hd1,1)/initrd.img
boot
Then I ran from Terminal:
sudo update-grub
But the external Hard Drive boot up remains as unreliable as ever.
fstab reads as follows:
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# / was on /dev/sdb1 during installation
UUID=0ea953b2-748a-449d-88c4-6db77d862b02 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home was on /dev/sdb5 during installation
UUID=0442794e-7b2f-4e34-9049-48bef45cfde1 /home ext4 defaults 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=a885107b-69a3-4ec0-912c-153521ab15fd none swap sw 0 0
# swap was on /dev/sdb6 during installation
UUID=da09b9fa-a9ec-47e2-84be-9a6c8a3c9638 none swap sw 0 0
Could it be that sda and sdb rederences are getting mixed up between the drives? If so, how do I stop this happening? Can the drive references sda & sdb be changed to fixed UIDs?
NOTE: Before installing Ubuntu on the external drive I tried SolydX 64bit and I don't recall the same problem, although I didn't run that very long. SolydX is based on Debian with an XFCE Desktop.
Many thanks in anticipation :-)