Running Mandrake from an external HD

[teslamaster1]

I installed Mandrake 9.2 on an external USB hard drive. The bios can support booting from the usb port. Lilo is also on the external drive. The problem is that I can't get it to boot up all the way. It runs Lilo fine and starts to boot fine, but gets errors half way through.

This is what is says:

Loading ext3.0 module
Mounting /proc filesystem
Creating root device
Mounting root filesystem with flags noatime
mount: error 6 mounting ext3 flags noatime
well, retrying without the option flags
mount: error 6 mounting ext3
well, retrying read-only without any flag
mount: error 6 mounting ext3
pivotroot:pivot_root(/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed:2
Remounting devfs at correct place if necessary
Mounted devfs on /dev
Freeing unused kernel memory: 176k freed
Kernel panic:No init found.Try passing init=option to kernel

Not knowing a lot about Unix, my guess is that the OS is trying to mount the hard drive before it initilizes the usb ports.

I tried a few things with the modules.conf file, but I couldn't get anything to work.

If anyone has any ideas it would be great.

thanks,
Charles

[bakedjake]

modules.conf

That's your problem. You'll need to recompile the kernel with USB support and USB mass storage enabled in the kernel (not modular, but compiled in).

Hard and fast rule - any drivers necessary to run the boot device need to be compiled in the kernel.

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