[Bug 27979] Re: Dapper boot failure from external USB hard drive

[Torrance]

I believe I have a similar problem, and can shed some light:

I have installed both Ubuntu (Breezy, and Flight 5 & 6) and openSUSE 10.1 (beta 9) on an external USB drive - openSUSE worked, Ubuntu did not.

The issue seems to be the order that the Ubuntu installer is listing the drives during install. For openSUSE my internal is listed as sda, and my external as sdb, whereas the Ubuntu installer lists my internal as sdb, and my external as sda. The problem here is that "sda" should always be the primary internal drive.

What this means is that when I try to boot, Ubuntu attempts to boot off an sda partition (whereas it should be booting off te external drive, ie. sdb), but of course the booting system believes this is referring to the internal drive, and of course there is no internal partition set for Ubuntu.

I tried to work around this by loading up my Ubuntu system (from another distro's install CD) and fixing the yaboot.conf file to point to the right partitions/drives. This worked, but problems remained as there are obviously other drive relationships set up during install that I had not changed, and, for example, a drive scan during startup failed.

I am not entirely sure if this is the same problem as above - if not, please let me know and I will file it as a separate bug.
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Dapper boot failure from external USB hard drive
https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/27979