Ubuntu Installation :: Unable To Boot From Removable Ext4 Drive
Oct 12, 2010
I recently downloaded Ubuntu 10.10 and installed it onto a 250gb removable disk using a 240gb ext4 partition and a 10gb swap space.
I am using a Sony VAIO (VPCF115FM) and it would appear that my BIOS is very limited as to bootup options. I can only choose internal HDD/external device/network/CD Drive. I cannot check whether or not my BIOS is able to recognize the external ext4 (but from experiences so far it would seem that it cannot)
After much tinkering i got my internal windows 7 to recognize the drive as ext3 (Used ext2 volume manager to add a registry entry for the drive). However, I need to unplug and replug in the drive for it to be recognized, if i leave it plugged in from booting it shows up as unrecognized.
Summary: I would like to be able to boot up Ubuntu off this external drive, but as of now it would appear that my BIOS is unable to recognize the drive. Windows can recognize it as ext3, and I can access contents of the ubuntu partition from windows.
how I could get this working that would be fantastic, i've tried formatting the drive to other filesystems (ext3,ext2,XFS) but none of them would work either, so any information would be sweet
After upgrading to 10.04 today, booting halts with the drive unavailable for mounting S to skip bla bla message. The drive in question is an Ipod, and didn't see it in fstab or mtab.
how to boot Ubuntu from USB flash drive that is formatted ext4?That is, making a portable ubuntu. But not merely a LiveUSB created using the 'Universal USB Installer' or 'UNetbootin' because the LiveUSBs created using these applications are formatted in FAT32 and uses a persistent partition just to save the changes and files.If I have your attention, what we want to achieve is a portable and bootable Ubuntu in a flash drive that is formatted in ext4.
I have an internal disk with Linux installed and a removable drive bay for swapping out my windows disks. I'd like to get grub to map one option to the bay and be able to boot whatever disk is in there.
Right now it's mapped by id "/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3250310AS_6RY00KB61" but I noticed there is a by-path option. I am not sure how to use it and the documentation isn't very detailed. Is by-path a good way to do this or is there some other way to get this to work?
I wanted to make a clone of my drive, so I tried the ole sudo dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdg1 trick, but first I formatted the drive to the Ext4 format. I wish I would have understood that format a little more before I decided to format it that way. Now I can't access my drive at all. I read almost everything on the net about manually mounting it, but almost everything was in Fat, NTFS, or Ext3/2 format. I even read the Ubuntu documentation. I don't know if it's because my drive is in Ext4 format, or if I'm just not doing something right.
As you can see in the following picture, it recognizes the drive, yet I am unable to mount it. I am trying to access the 160 GB drive. I even tried to see if Windows would recognize it. No go. Today while lurking in the Ubuntu Forums I found a way to make a live .iso of my system (which I think is awesome). So now I want to reformat my drive and use it as storage once again. I think I will restore it to NTFS. I thought that the Ext4 format would work better in Linux (which I was wrong), but now I need Windows to recognize it as well, and it needs to be able to store files bigger than 4 GB (unless you have a suggestion on what to format it as).
Just installed opensuse 11.3 Kdeversion on my laptop. Before installing it on live mode i had a problem of accessing my other drives (NTFS, FAT32 and EXT4) which said HAL system policy...etc mounting error. I could access all drives with root privilege. I thought problem will be solver once i install opensuse on my system. How ever i was really disappointed after seeing the same problem post install. Googled around for the solution and got this link
[Code]...
After this the problem got worse now i am not able to see any of the drives in the side panel. Gone through many forum and posts all discuss about external USB HDD.
I had a little mission this week-end = my girlfriends 250Gb SATA hard drive laptop crashed this week (video card failure), and I wanted to help her by getting all her valuable data on an old Pachard Bell EasyNote laptop I have hanging around.One big problem : this laptop does not boot on CD drive, nor USB drive, and does not have a Floppy slot. There is an old hard drive with a lot of bad sectors in it, and I have a 80Gb IDE drive I want to put in.
My tools : a SATA to USB adapter, a IDE to USB adapter, a Ubuntu 9.10 LiveCD, a Windows7-run netbook, and the web.My goal : to configure the hard drive in some sort for it to install Ubuntu on boot (much like when you buy a laptop : the OS installs on first boot).I quickly found this to be impossible, as there is no Ubuntu pre-install format available (or that I found). So the next step was to get a complete install on the new hard drive, one way or another.First I tried cloning the 250SATA drive on the 80GB IDE drive, but this clearly led to an error (Grub error 18. It was looking for a 250Gb drive where I only fed him 80.)
Next step was to get some kind of LiveCD-like boot from the hard drive. This is made possible by using the UNetBootIn tool and the related Ubuntu Documentation. I met some problems during the real Ubuntu Install at the point where the laptop tried to format the drive the CD image was on. This other Ubuntu Guide gives a few workarounds and tweaks for that situation, but they didn't solve the issue for me.Final idea was to Live-CD like boot from the rubbish hard drive and install the system on the new hard drive plugged in through USB. This failed because the computer does not boot LiveCD-like on the old hard drive...
I'm kinda stuck on what to do now. I still don't have a nice boot on the computer (only a Live-CD like obtained with the UNetBootIn tool), and am still not capable of doing a "real" install on the Laptop.I'm aware that solving the boot-from-cd issue would bring me a faster solution (maybe!), but the idea was to get a hang on this so that I can install Ubuntu on my CD-free netbook soon (Although my netbook might very well boot on USB, but still).My final and last idea is to go buy some kind of adapter that would let me plug the two hard drives into the laptop at the same time, LiveCD-like boot on the new one, install Ubuntu on the old one (connected directly via IDE) and then clone the old one to the new one. But I wish I don't have to go to that extreme ;o)Writing this I just thought of one thing : I could install Live-CD like Ubuntu on a flash drive, launch it on my netbook and install Ubuntu on the new hard drive connected through USB... Would that work?
So here is my situation: I am unable to boot from a CD I am unable to boot from a Flash Drive I have Ubuntu installed with Wubi, and can boot into it successfully I have a Ubuntu Installation CD I have created a partition into which I'd like to install Ubuntu. Is it possible to boot into my current Wubi Ubuntu installation, and then launch the Ubuntu installer from the installation CD, and then direct this installation to the empty partition I have waiting?
Basically, I think my question is this: Does anybody know what file to run manually from the CD in order to launch the installer?
I am trying to install ubuntu 11.04 from a bootable USB flash drive. As i couldnt create the USB using the inbuilt usb creator which came with the .iso file i had downloaded, i had used universal USB installer to create it. It took a lot of time to created the bootable pendrive.
I had copied the contents of the pendrive thus created to a folder on my hard disk and named it 'PENDRIVE'. Later i had formatted the pendrive and used it for other purposes.
Today, i wanted to install ubuntu on another computer, so i copied the contents of this folder to my pendrive (instead of creating a bootable usb drive using universal USB installer again) and renamed my pendrive as 'PENDRIVE'. But when i tried to boot from it (i had changed the boot order of my computer accordingly) i got this message, 'remove any removable cd or media and press any button to restart'. Until i removed the pendrive my system refused to start and i was unable to install ubuntu. Why did this happen?
then I used dd to transfer data from the old drive to the new drive. Now I am unable to boot into the new drive. I tried to boot again from the live-CD but fdisk reports that the drive has no partition table. I can still mount the devices (e.g. mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3) and I can see all the files. But without a partition table, I can't set one partition to be bootable. Why doesn't gparted create a partition table? it created the filesystems just fine. how do I boot into the new disk? What do I have to do to make grub handle the new disk?
Im trying to do a frugal install off the hard drive (no usb,cdrom) with unetbootin. It installs grub and then will boot the installer but is still tries to find the removable media. Whats going on????
i recently bought a new pair of rams, after i installed them (removed the old ones) ubuntu started lagging and all my applications started normaly, after half a minute they didn't respond for 2 minutes and then back to normal again. So i decided to delete the ubuntu partition and re-install ubuntu. I begin the installation normaly but it stucks at 5% where the partitioning takes place.
I also tried gparted to create an ext3 and ext4 partitions but i had the same problem on both tries. I believe it is a ram problem, should i go and replace them, or there is a possible solution without replacing them? (Also run the memtest 86+ for 4 hours and there were no errors).
I have $ uname -a Linux kub 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Mon Mar 7 21:35:22 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Most of the time when I boot my PC I get an error about fsck.ext4: Unable to resolve... I don't know why it's happening.
The problem is happening with my external drive that has 3 partitions: /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdc3 /dev/sdc2
About 90% of the time I boot I do get the error. Sometimes after getting the error I can login and the external drive (/dev/sdc) is already mounted: $ df -H Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda2 15G 8.0G 5.8G 58% / tmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /lib/init/rw udev 1.9G 246k 1.9G 1% /dev tmpfs 1.9G 738k 1.9G 1% /dev/shm code....
The UUID's in the error file match the output of the command blkid. And the UID's of blkid match the fstab UUID's. I don't know what to do at this point.
When booting I get the following error message: Code: The disk drive for EXT4 is not ready yet or not present. Continue to wait; or press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery.
The drive in question is SSD2, which I wanted to mount as an extended disk (non OS). This is what I did: FDISK: Code: Disk /dev/sdb: 64.0 GB, 64023257088 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7783 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00029baa
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 1 7783 62516916 85 Linux extended BLKID: Code: /dev/sdb1: LABEL="SSD2" UUID="#######" TYPE="ext4" FSTAB: Code: UUID=####### ext4 /media/mountSSD2 defaults 0 2
I'm guessing that when one purchases music that the file first goes to 'cloud storage' and then to sync with Rhythmbox? I would like to see that as an option. I personally would rather the file(s) be downloaded straight to my laptop. B'cause once I get my server up and running I would have the local storage space of my own to grab the files from, and redundancy with backed up partitions if some files would get messed up. I enjoy using Ubuntu OS. I don't use Windows anymore, or OS-X, so using iTunes isn't an option for me.
I wait for the day that I can trade up from this iPhone to an Android. I like the way that a pc would see an Android phone as a removeable drive so instead of syncing. I just prefer to drag/drop or copy/paste music files, rather than syncing.
I have been able to get most of the way through the process of changing from using ext4 back to using ext3, but something is not quite right so my system does not boot properly.
I have a system that was running Karmic Koala 9.10 as a server (no graphical environment). I had two drives using RAID1 with LVM on top, where the logical volumes of oldvg (old volume group) were using mostly ext4. /boot was not part of the RAID: it's on a separate physical drive and uses ext2.
I recently added two more drives and used RAID1 and LVM, and made all lv partitions (/, /usr, /var, /tmp, /opt, /home, /srv) ext3. I used rsync to duplicate the contents onto the logical volumes of newvg (new volume group). I was careful with rsync's option switches, and this part seems to be fine.
I also edited (the new) /etc/fstab and changed the UUIDs of the seven mount points to point to the logical volumes that are part of newvg instead of oldvg, and added new entries to (the new) /boot/grub/menu.lst to refer to newvg in addition to those that I left around to refer to oldvg.
This wasn't sufficient: rebooting here failed, but I went in with a rescue disk, and first updated /boot/grub/device.map to include the new physical drives. I then mounted all the new logical volumes, mounted boot also at its proper place, and entered a chroot of the new system as it should be mounted. Once there, (and after making a backup of /boot) I ran "update-initramfs -k all -c" to rebuild the initrd images that were stored on /boot. Finally, I also edited /etc/mtab so that the two entries that referred to oldvg now refer to newvg instead.
Now, the machine begins to boot from newvg, but the console text includes messages like:
And a bit later,
Now, at this shell if I type mount, I see:
I am actually confused as to why there are only entries for /root and /var in /etc/mtab, actually, instead of entries for all of the main mount points. I am thinking it must be part of the boot staging process, because there are entries for newvg-usr, newvg-tmp, etc. in /etc/fstab.
When I type any of pvdisplay, vgdisplay, or lvdisplay, I get
In fact, even if I run lvm, I get a similar error:
However, if I go back to the rescue cd, pvdisplay, vgdisplay, and lvdisplay do show that all of the partitions from both the old and new volume groups are available.
my laptop, which i run ubuntu on, is getting a bit old and i find it's getting slower and slower at running applications. My desktop computer is stronger, but I can't give up on the portability of my laptop.I was thinking of installing a HD drawer for both my laptop and desktop. and when I come home just pull the HD from the laptop and plug it into the desktop.
I used to have all my mp3s, photos, etc. on a Seagate "Freeagent" removable USB drive and share it over a Windows network. We've gone all Linux in the house and I tried to export the same drive over NFS (got the NTFS support installed, ntfs-3g) but get this error:
Code: Starting NFS services: exportfs: Warning: /media/FreeAgent Drive does not support NFS export.
I have 2 USB drives connected to an XP machine that I rotate twice a month for backups. On my CentOS box, I have that drive mounted at /home/backup using cifs.
Because the drive is mounted on the Linux box, Windows XP complains when I try to "Safely Remove Hardware". As a result, I have to "umount /home/backup", then "Safely Remove Hardware". After connecting the new drive, I then have to "mount /home/backup" in order to use it again on the Linux box.
Now, this question may be a Windows XP question, but I was wondering if there is anything I can do on the Linux box first. Is there anything that can be done on either end, so that I won't have to "umount /home/backup" first?
I booted into the Fedora 11 on my netbook, and used the desktop icon to install to hard-drive. I specified to use "Free space", and hit next. From there, it just stalls. The "Install Fedora" window does nothing, and I'm going on a half-hour now of nothing.
Tried three times, still nothing.
The first time I tried, I chose to replacce old linux installation (ubuntu), and when I told it to install Fedora 11 root as ext4, it said the boot can't be ext4... so I chose ext3 and it said root device must be ext4...
I am running the latest suse release downloaded directly from their website. I ran the installation after buring the dvd and everything seemed to be working fine. after the installation i ran updates and used it for a little bit. When i shut it down that night and went to restart it I got an error that stated the OS wasnt there. I then went through the installation and everything and it retained the information from the installation before (web history etc.) but for some reason every time I reboot or shut it down the system is not able to read the startup information from the hard drive and will not come on without me re installing it.
Recently set up root encryption with a couple of LVM volumes inside one LUKS volume, and I am just a little confused as to how I would go about getting it to automatically unlock using a keyfile stored on a USB flash drive, I presume I would have to put the drive in the fstab inside my initramfs (if there is one), and add a hook for USB device support.
But I digress, essentially, I want to know what I have to do to enable my LUKS volume (containing all of my partitions sans /boot) to unlock using a keyfile stored on a USB flash drive, rather than a manually entered passphrase.
I have a samsung removable hard drive, which have 3 fat32 partitions on it. When I plug into the usb. nothing happened and i just see a sdc was added in /dev/...so, there's nothing wrong with the drive, because i can use it on windows and ubuntu.
Shrinking the Vista partition and format the rest of the HD as ext4 and install Fedora into that partition and put the GRUB in MBR, is this the right way to dual-boot fedora with Vista?
I live in a country where 1Mbit broadband is a premium service for large businesses. I am paying a little over $40 a month for a 128k connection with monthly capping. I want to download Fedora but the download is just huge for my connection, especially as it is used for work 14 hours a day. I have attempted the LiveCD and got the 'ext4 cannot be used for boot' error. I also have several other specialised distros on this machine and it's going to be a pain inserting a new boot partition just for Fedora.
Like it is possible with Slackware, can I just download the first CD of the Fedora 11 set and get a minimal install from this or does Fedora need the whole set of disks? Is there a simple enough net install option that I could use instead? I can't understand why they can't just release something like Ubuntu's alternate install CD.
Dual Booting my laptop and unable to change the Boot Records on the drive. Not because I dont know how, but my primary OS will fail to boot(win7).
I have drive partitioned as follows... sda1 = Win7 system (default install) sda2 = Win7 Main (default install) sda3 = swap sda4 = Extension (I think thats what its called) sda5 = / (ext4)
What I need is a boot cd or perferably Grub installed on a 256MB Thumb drive with the options to load the installed system from sda5.
ok I am using Debian 4 bigmem and I set up static ip for my box. This is for a class and we will be moving the hard drives around the lab to different computers. My question is what do I configure to get Debian to be ok with my using different nics at different times.
My first time I used it, I had eth0, but now I'm on a different computer (same type of hardware on all systems) but my nic is now eth1... And I had to set up static again for that nic. How can I have it just maintain a static ip for whatever nic/mac address on the computer that my hard drive happens to be put on?
I am using Debian 4 bigmem and I set up static ip for my box. This is for a class and we will be moving the hard drives around the lab to different computers. My question is what do I configure to get Debian to be ok with my using different nics at different times. My first time I used it, I had eth0, but now I'm on a different computer (same type of hardware on all systems) but my nic is now eth1... And I had to set up static again for that nic. How can I have it just maintain a static ip for whatever nic/mac address on the computer that my hard drive happens to be put on?
Im having a serious issue with booting ubuntu 10.04, the issue being it wont boot up at all, after working so well for so long (i suspect some recent dodgy system updates are responsible) so I decided to just reinstall ubuntu from scratch again but wanted to retrieve some important files from my root device. So I am running the live desktop and I can see my previous filesystems under places but cannot mount or open my original root device where the files I want to recover are located, I receive this error msg:"Unable to mount 77 GB Filesystem.
