Software :: How To Boot Slackware From Seagate External HDD
Jan 3, 2011
How could I get the Slackware Linux distro on my external HDD booted up from my notebook? I'm using a notebook bought in 2006, the configuration is 60GB HDD, 940gml chip, 2GB memory, 1.6GHz Celeron-D CPU. I bought a USB2.0 3.5inch 1TB "Seagate Expansion External Drive". The file system of the only partition on it is NTFS. I installed Grub MBR on the external HDD using grubinst then copy the grldr, grub.exe and menu.lst to it, added Slax to the only partition, then I could get Slax booting up. However, the external HDD could only get booting up when my notebook is first power on; if I reboot it, the external HDD would auto turn off and on when sef-checking and cannot be shown in the Esc boot menu. I tried to install Slackware 13.1 to the external HDD successfully but failed to boot. I used WinPM to resize the primary partition to make about 60GB space at the end of the disk for Linux distro.
I booted the Slackware USB image from Grub4DOS, and ran cfdisk to make partitions from the 60GB space for Linux, ran setup to install Slackware. Then at the step of the lilo bootloader configure, if I select to install the lilo in MBR, it would fail to boot, displaying "L..."; if I select to install the lilo in the super block of the "root" partition then boot from grub, it would fail too, because I found that there is no way to mount the Linux partitions of the external HDD in the grub cmd line. When I say "root (hd0,4)", it would halt without any prompt. If I say "root (hd0," then press the Tab key, instead of listing the partitions on hd0, it would halt too. If I set the root partition of the Linux install as the second primary partition and install Slackware distro to it, the grub would show error either saying it cannot recorgnize the ext4 file system(ext4 fs, sda2) or unable to mount selected partition(ext2 fs).
Alright, im completely new to linux. I am somewhat knowledgeable with computers in general. My programming instructor for school told us that it would be in our best interest of the course to grab a linux distro and install it on our computers. (Don't ask me why, i dont know)ANYWAY, i am trying to get debian to install on my external USB 1.5TB Seagate HDD Drive. After learning a lot about Murphy's Law, i had to fix my MBR for windows (the windows installation is located on my internal SATA 1.5TB Seagate Drive) because GRUB wouldnt boot to windows unless i had my external plugged in.
So, the natural solution to me was to fix the MBR, unplug the internal, then re-install on my external, it worked. Well to my surprise, this cloud i was on... wasn't cloud 9. NOW, Debian will boot if i have the external plugged in and windows will boot if i have the internal plugged in. The Problem is, when i have both plugged in and my external set as the boot drive i get this weird error and it will not let me boot linux.Now, i have searched for a fix.. But the ones i have tried so far haven't worked or i wasn't sure how to use those fixes(because im new).The error went as follows:/bin/sh can't access tty; job control mode offthen i get a initramfs command line. (I think thats proper terminology)The temporary fix i have going right now is i have my computer open and the SATA cable unplugged so i can boot to Debian.
SUMMARY OF HARDWARE SPECS:1.5 TB INTERNAL HDD (SATA)2 INTERNAL DVD BURNERS3 GIGs of RAM2.8ghz AMD Athlon x2 (I think its 2.EXTERNAL 1.5TB HDDDEBIAN VERSION:I believe its Debian 507 by looking at the download linkhttp://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/5.0 ... etinst.iso
I've have been playing around mounting ISO movies, and found that my external HDDs now won't mount. I run UBUNTU Lucid Lynx, and want to change distros, but need to put everything to my external drives before that change.
I have a Seagate Freedesk external drive. I formatted it to ext3 (as per several posts regarding this)However I cannot mount the drive. If I go "places" "computer" I can see the drive (simply entitled USB Drive) but if I try to open it it says "cannot mount the drive". If I right click and select "Mount Volume" I get Nothing. How can I get this to auto mount like other usb drives? I am using Hardy on a Compaq Laptop.
I have been a Linux user for about 6 years now, and recently switched to Fedora just to try something new. I used Ubuntu for the majority of the time so I am somewhat familiar with the command line, but seem to be having trouble with my external HDD. Ubuntu automounted it no problem. Fedora doesn't seem to like to do that. I tried searching and I did what almost every thread insisted upon; which is mount /dev/sdb(that is what dmesg said) but it says already mounted or /mnt/busy. So this is the extent of my Terminal experience with mounting an external drive, and I am completely dumbfounded as to why it simply won't mount. I am liking Fedora so far and so long as there is a remedy for this I don't plan on going back.
I have a 2TB Seagate GoFlex Desk External HDD. I want to format it. Which is the best disk format, which will be supported in all OS, like Windows, Linux and Mac?
I was trying to reformat my Seagate external hard drive and I selected "free Space," in disk utility not realizing that the computer would no longer recognize the device. I'm trying to install Snow Leopard on it so now how do I format it now to the GUID format? I luckily backed up the entire contents of the hard drive (The essential files on it), but what do I do now that the computer doesen't recognize it!?
I have a 1TB usb External Hard drive (Segate), I would like to install linx on that drive. I tried red Hat it does not find hard drive. I run open suse, I partition the hard drive. After installation of disk 1 it reboots, at that point it does not go to usb external drive.
I purchased a Seagate Goflex 500GB external hard drive yesterday and tried to connect it with my Fedora machine. Unfortunately my machine could not mount the drive. I have never had such problems earlier with other USB drives.PLease, how to use this ext disk on the fedora machine.
I installed Ubuntu on external USB hard drive and while booting I did got option to log into windows XP, Ubuntu. Both operating systems ran fine. i.e. GRUB had overwritten MBR and I was able to dual boot. Main issue: I have installed Ubuntu in external hard-drive so that I can use Linux whenever I want other people who are using same computer can operate on WindowsXP. Sometimes my external hard drive gives problem if there is loose connection and so that oper people using computer do not face any problem I want to disconnect external USB HD whenever I am not using Linux. GRUB menu was pointing to external hardrive so disconnecting it meant my system wont boot!!I rewrote MBR using WindowsXP CD recovery mode. Now I am unable to boot from external USB hard disk( I thought I would be able to if I choose USB hard drive in BIOS option but it did not work it logged into WindowsXP by default).Is there any way I can change WindowsXP boot.ini file so that it also shows Ubuntu in external hard disk? Or is there any way.(I do not want GRUB way as then I would have to keep my external drive connected to log into windows - which I do not want).
After installing ubuntu 9.10 on external HDD I cannot boot vista if external usb is unplugged(where ubuntu is installed). it says grub loading and after that recover grub ( i think that is what is says ... not certain in this moment ) anyway hope you get my dilemma. If you need more information I'll be glad to provide it.
Can Ubuntu install and boot from external HD while still booting windows off internal HD?In an attempt to spread Ubuntu my friend wants to use ubuntu off an external HD and still have windows fully operational on the internal HD. Questions:1) Can Ubuntu install on external HD without tricky mounting methods and if so how doabout it?2) The bois have the capability to boot from usb, will grub work?
I've spent two whole days trying to get this to work and I believe I may be on the verge of insanity.
In any event, my goal is to have Slackware 13.0 be installed on an external USB drive and for any computer I use to be able to boot from that USB drive and load Linux.
I used fdisk to completely repartition the external hard drive making the first partition for '/' and toggling the boot flag on it.
I installed lilo on the USB drive, rebooted, disabled the internal hard drive, and instructed the computer to boot from USB.
"No boot options available."
I assumed there was a problem with the MBR. I booted into Slackware setup, performed a lilo -mbr on the external hard drive. Rebooted.
Still "No boot options available."
What could possibly be wrong? Yes, my computer does support booting from USB.
Do all hard drives have MBR's? Does fdisk overwrite the MBR when you partition it? If it does, do I have to ignore the first 1MB when I partition my disk so that lilo can boot from it? I remember having to do similar with 'parted' when I had to format a flash drive for being bootable.
The other problem I have is that the /dev/sda can change. Just because a USB drive is /dev/sda today doesn't mean it won't be /dev/sdb tomorrow. Is it even possible to have a boot loader load correctly, considering that you hard code the device name into the /etc/lilo.conf? I was thinking of using grub to manually choose where to boot at load, but that doesn't seem to be an option as grub looks like (i may be mistaken) it tries to find a root and then looks for the grub config info in that drive. I also don't think that grub loads USB drivers at runtime, nor do I think lilo does either, which makes me wonder even more if it's remotely possible.
I put a larger drive in my netbook and stuck the old in an external USB enclosure so I could use it for backups. It had three partitions on it, ntfs and linux so I deleted all the partitions and created one big linux partition. Every time I write and exit fdisk the removable disk utility in KDE pops up and says ntfs drive. If I ignore it and try to formatit wants to use ntfs, if I fsck.ext3 it saysThe superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2filesystem. If the deviceis valid and it really contains an ext2filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblockis corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:e2fsck -b 8193 <device>2fsck -b 8193 doesn't work either.It seems like its caching something, I can print the partition table and see the one linux partition I created.
Yesterday, I bought a 1TB WD Passport, for backup and storage. It uses NTFS, and I've had no problems manually mounting and moving files to and from it from root. However, I don't like having to be root to in any way modify the data on the drive. In order to avoid this I decided to create a line in fstab that would allow permissions to the user, so I added this to my fstab:
This allows me to mount, unmount, and peruse the external HDD - however, if this is active, neither the user NOR root have permission to make any changes. The HDD acts as read only, even though there is no "ro" option on my fstab.
I've searched around and found a lot of reports of people's FreeAgent drives randomly spinning down (and what to do about it), or for people who can see the drive but can't mount it. I have a different problem: I can't see the drive at all. I plug it in, andit makes a beeping noise for a while (think 'Defcon 4', but not as loud). Then, it stops, but nothing's happened. fdisk -l just shows my normal 4 partitions.I'm running Ubuntu (Karmic), and this is a 500 GB FreeAgent GO drive from Seagate (brand new, right out-of-the-box).
No SATA capable systems around the house to test this drive out, but with a SATA to USB converter I have been able to access SATA drives except this one particular Seagate drive. Upon connecting this drive dmesg shows
Code: [173156.023440] usb 1-1.2.3: USB disconnect, device number 25 [173181.235788] usb 1-1.2.3: new high speed USB device number 26 using ehci_hcd
I have installed "open-SUSE 11.4" on a "500GB Free Agent External Hard Drive". I didn't have any problem in booting since last week that I booted it from my laptop. Also I did it before several times from then when I try to boot it e.g. from an "Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9400 @ 2.66GHz" PC the time between loading INITRD and starting boot sequence messages lasts nearly 30 minutes!(i didn't actually measure it but it take a long time in the same order). after starting boot sequence which is showed on monitor everything looks normal. e.g copy of files would be done by speeds between 2MB/s to 30 MB/s depending on the targets.I used to use the external hard derive to boot from different laptops and PC's from start but I didn't have such a problem anytime.
So I got slackware 13 from the website and created 4 partitions (primary) and left some (100GB) space as I planned to install windows 7 in that. After installing slack, when I booted from windows DVD (rtm) in partition section it said I already have 4 primary partition so windows cannot used the rest of space despite the fact that it was free (windows even grayed all options like new partition and format etc. for that space). So I thought I'd create 2-3 primary partition for linux (slackware) so that windows can use the free space and make it a primary partition.
So, Next I formatted with slack (3 partition, 2 Primary, 1 extended, total space for slack 50GB) and after its installation I worked my way with windows, but it just created one partition of 100Gb, won't let me create any saying all primary partitions are created. Anyway, I created that partition and installed windows 7. But it messed up my lilo (slack won't show in boot menu) neither can I create any new partition.
After all I reformatted again created 2 partitions for windows (that actually became 3 as windows 7 create 100Mb separate partition for system). Installed windows correctly. Then I booted with slack , which allowed only creating 1 partition as 3 were already there. So I created 1 extended partition, in which I created 4 partition 1 to mount for /boot (100M), 1 for /swap (3G), 1 for home (10G), 1 for / (35G) everything worked fine till I reached last point to install lilo. At that point it said cannot install Lilo (I tried all options simple, expert, install to MBR etc.) but it just won't install. Anyway, after that it said you can install it manually so I clicked OK. Then it said setup complete, remove disk and press alt+ctrl+del to reboot, which I did. But there is just windows 7, no slack ?
My wife takes her laptop on her travels but recently has been getting a connection refused when attempting to connect to our home server. The only reason I believe this is occurring is because of iptables blocking certain IP addresses which I don't want to delete for SPAM prevention.
What configuration what be both secure and relatively straight forward. Initially configured mac filtering but then realised this would not be appropriate under these circumstances..
Also there is no specific logging in either postfix or dovecot about connection refused.
I have slackware 13.1 installed on my laptop and use kde.I just bought a new external monitor 1680 X 1050. The laptop's monitor is 1280 X 800. From KDE i configured laptop's screen to be inactive and the external monitor at resolution 1680 X 1050. When i boot and enter KDE both monitors are activated, ican't understand their resolution. Then, just when i enter system configuration-monitor-monitor configuration the laptop's monitor automaticly turns off. Then i configure the external to 1680 X 1050 resolution. This happens every time i have to enter slackware. How to setup my xorg.conf file. You can see it below:
I have a seagate goflex hdd, some time back did copy some data from a computer (windows) now its showing drive need to fix on windows 7. The same hdd is working fine on opensuse 11.4, it is just a virus problem or the drive is actually failing down?
My Seagate Momentus XT hybrid hard drive is corrupting files on Linux. I would appreciate help from anyone, but I'd particularly like to know if other Momentus XT users are able to reproduce this problem;I have provided step-by-step instructions for reproducing this issue on the Seagate Community Forums.So far, four users have reproduced this problem on the following laptops and OS/distributions:
Five laptops: Lenovo Thinkpad T60, T61, T510, MSI MS-1656-ID1, and MacBook Pro (15" late 2009). Four OS/distributions: Ubuntu 11.04, Fedora 15, openSUSE, and Mac OS X.
The instructions for reproducing the problem are simple. Here is a brief verbal description: Create a large test file, save it to another storage device (not the Momentus XT), and compute the SHA-1 checksum.Write the test file to the Momentus XT.Read the test file from the Momentus XT, calculate the SHA-1, and compare this checksum with the checksum of the original. We should have a match. We have probably reproduced the problem if they don't match. (Only 'probably', because it is possible for other issues to cause a mismatch. See the Seagate thread about identifying this specific problem by comparing the files with cmp -l.)Repeat from step (2).The Seagate thread has more details. Here are some notes from my testing (I have been able to reproduce this problem on three consecutive Momentus XT drives; I RMA'd twice and am now on the third one):
What seems to be happening is that the Momentus XT sometimes neglects to write data to the drive, so that when I read from the drive, I get what was originally on the sector, and not the correct data. This occurs in blocks of different sizes; typical sizes are 1 MiB and 512 KiB.Problem occurs on ext2, ext4, Btrfs, NTFS, and FAT32. Strangely, I was not able to reproduce this problem on ext3.Writing with the oflag=direct output flag in dd avoids this problem. Rapidly commiting data to disk with while true; do sync; sleep 0.01; done also prevents the problem.
I have only been able to reproduce this problem through a SATA and an eSATA interface. A USB connection seems to prevent the problem. (Not sure if this is due to transfer speed.)problems occur more often with large files (>2 GB). I was not able to produce problems with files smaller than about 85 MB.I was not able to reproduce the problem on Windows XP with NTFS.Gazoi at the Seagate forums was unable to reproduce the problem on FreeBSD 8.2 with UFS2.The Momentus XT passes both the extended SMART test and badblocks -w with no issues.My laptop (MS-1656-ID1) has successfully passed through 24 hours each of Memtest86+, Memtest86, memtester,and MPrime.I have tested two other storage devices (a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 and an Intel 320 series SSD) with the same procedure, and they both pass with no issues.
I have a Seagate Goflex external hard drive. When I plug it in it has set up files for Mac and Windows, but I'm new to Ubuntu and do not know how to set it up on here. How can I go about doing this?
I'm looking at getting a Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB drive for my HTPC. However I was initially looking at the WD Cavier Green due to it's power saving features. Upon finding out about the Green's problems interacting with the Linux Kernel I have ditched the idea of getting a WD.
Does the Barracuda suffer from similar problems as the Cavier Green.Are there any problems at all with the drive and the kernel not playing nice together? Do I need to set anything in the kernel config to help enable power saving features of the drive so that when the PC is not in use the drive uses as little power as possible?
I recently had a laptop die on me. I, of course, then to recover the hard drive. I wanted to install slackware to a partition on my drive, so I can have a linux distro with me( also I have a FAT32 partition for shared space) I have a Slackware 13.1 disk one (which i need, since I don't need a graphical environment or anything), and proceedd to follow setup program. I have a 5GB '/' partition, a 10GB '/home' partition, and a 2GB swap partition. My ROOT partition is bootable. The setup program seemed to complete succesfully, but it won't boot. When I choose to boot from my hard drive (in the bios), it reverts to the slackware disk, if present, or the standard windows drive.
I installed LILO to the superblock of my external, because according to the setup the MBR option installs to "The MBR of your first hard drive", and I wasn't sure if that was right, since my first hard drive is my windows one. Since i'm not even seeing LILO, I think it has to do with installing to the superblock. I want to be able to boot a basic linux distro if needed from whatever computer I want. I'm not sure if slackware was the right choice, but it was one that I had worked with installing before, and knewthat you didn't necasarraly have to instal all the graphics stuff. I just want a shell. Sorry if my question sounds retarted, I'm new to the whole "Multiple drives, and operating systems" thing
I thought it was a driver issue, but after messing around with the ALSA mixer a lot, it turned out that when I enabled headphones(or disabled, honestly not sure) that my headphones worked, and when I took them out the speakers worked. Then when I rebooted for whatever reason, only the speakers(built-in) worked. Really, I'm not sure why this is.
When I got them to work there was a switch for the headphones in the graphical mixer(which is what I used, not the ncurses[?] ALSA thing), but I can't seem to find that anymore. It's not a major issue, it just puts me off watching videos and listening to music because my laptop speakers are really low quality. I'd go out to buy a pair of external speakers, but obviously with the audio jack not working, this could be problematic.
I guess I could buy USB external speakers but then the probability of Slackware having pre-installed audio drivers for a cheap generic brand of speakers is so low it doesn't justify the effort of going and buying some, nor the money that would be spent. Willing to enter any commands/w.e. I'll be on Slackware all the time 'cause I need a Linux system right now.
kde 4.3.4 kernel 2.6.32.7-smp Have Seagate 500GB (fuseblk) external usb drive that gets listed in the "Devices recently plugged in, pop-up panel" but a Verbatim 1.5TB does not. I have to mount it manually as ntfs volume.
When I boot using the Mint distro on same PC both ext usb drives are automounted. Looking for pointers as to why the 1.5TB verbatim disk does not automount.
