Grub problem with external USB drive

yinyang

Hi,

I am currently trying to install Gentoo on an external USB drive connected to my laptop (Vaio VGN-FE41Z).
The problem is when I try to boot from the drive I get a black screen with GRUB in the top left corner without any error message and no way to continue other than rebooting.

The partition layout looks like this:
/dev/sdaX - internal laptop hard drive
/dev/sdb1 - /boot
/dev/sdb2 - /

I installed grub in the MBR of the USB drive - root (hd1,0) and setup (hd1)

My grub.conf:

cyrillic · Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2008 2:11 am Post subject:

This part confuses a lot of people.

When you were installing GRUB, your internal harddrive was called (hd0), and your external harddrive was called (hd1).
However, when you boot from your external drive, GRUB (actually the BIOS) will call the external drive (hd0), and the internal harddrive (hd1).

All you have to do is change both (hd1,0) to (hd0,0) in your grub.conf , then it should be able to boot.

yinyang · Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2008 10:14 am Post subject:

Thanks for your reply, I tried changing it, but it still doesn't work. I don't get error 15 or any other error message for that matter, just a GRUB with a blinking cursor in the top left corner.
Even if the drive assignments were wrong, shouldn't I be able to correct them with the grub editor on the fly after boot?

cyrillic · Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2008 4:57 am Post subject:

yinyang · Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2008 10:02 pm Post subject:

The output is still the same. I already changed the path to the splash image to (hd0,0) when following your first advice, but even removing it entirely doesn't help.
Google said that this behavior (GRUB with blinking cursor) is caused by Grub not being able to read its stage 1 which should be located in the MBR of my USB drive.
I guess the question is why doesn't Grub recognizes it even if I definitly installed it there.