Run gentoo off an external drive

[nadin]

Hey,

I work mainly in an windows environment, and so i havent had the need to use gentoo, but the partitioning on my drive suck and i am runing out of disk space (i am using a laptop), so my gentoo installation might be in jeperdy. However I was thinking of doing the following,

I was going to purchase another laptop drive, with the usb encloser. If the drive my laptop has 2 paritions, one for /boot and the other for windows, can i easily configure grub to boot of the sda1 or whatever which contains gentoo on the external usb disk.

My laptop does not have the ability to boot of usb normally hence why i need grub on the original drive. Is it difficult to do this? I read some where that i might need to use initrd with my kernel. If i do is it hard to do? I have compiled a dozen kernels but never had to do anything with initrd.

Thanks,

Nadin

[NeddySeagoon]

nadin,

You no longer need an initrd to boot from USB.
Be sure to build into your kernel all the usb support you need to boot and attach the root filesystem.
The last trick is the rootdelay=<sec> kernel line parameter in grub.conf.

Normally, root would be mouted before USB is started, which is a really bad idea if root is on a USB drive.
The rootdelay parameter, tells the kerenl to wait before attempting to mount root, meanwhile other kernel things are started, including USB. Values of rootdelay between 7 and 30 are reported to work but its a case of trial and error.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[cyrillic]