As mentioned a few days ago, I’m having problems with Portable Ubuntu. This morning, fed up with my perfectionist ways, I decided to jump through the hoops required to do it the no-brainer way, that Justin suggested. I wish I hadn’t.
I popped out the laptop hard drive, plugged in the portable USB drive and ran through the Ubuntu install with everything at the default.
I had some trouble with the Disk Partitioner despite the fact that I was letting it have the entire disk. I think the cable I was using to power the drive wasn’t up to par. So, I switched to a different cable but ended up partitioning it manually because I’d already tried it 5 times the other way and just wanted it to work. I’m pretty damn familiar with disk partitioning and none of the options I selected or buttons I pressed had anything to do with which partitions would be made bootable or where the boot loader would be installed. Therefore, I’m fairly certain that I didn’t mess anything up this way.
After manually partitioning the install went right through. It said it was done, I hit enter, popped out the CD and rebooted.
At which point it told me it couldn’t find any bootable devices.
At least when I did it my way the BiOS considered it bootable and just couldn’t boot it.
So what’s wrong now?
Is it really my partitioning? I mean, really?
Or is it the drive? Well, two drives, cause the flash card install I tried didn’t work either. And when I hook it to a running linux box it looks fine. So does the flash card. But I’m sure they could be messed up in some way. Maybe the manufacturers of both of these devices have deliberately disabled USB booting?
Or maybe it’s my BiOS? These two machines are nothing alike and bought at very different times with very different feature sets. Both BiOSes claim to support this, but I’m sure it’s possible that they are both broken, right?
Maybe this Ubuntu disk has a faulty install method? I mean 7.10 is widely used and certainly widely tested, but maybe I’ve found a bug that no one has ever seen before. Maybe I should go buy a regular hard drive and put it in a machine and install Ubuntu normally just to see if that works?
Or maybe… just maybe… possibly… the boot loader just isn’t installing correctly. Yeah. I think I’ll go with that one.
I’m not a grub/lilo expert… I know just enough to get by. If any of you have any suggestions as to why that part of this isn’t working, I’m all ears. Thanks in advance.
Maybe Ubuntu really does have some lot of undocumented Grub magic that ONLY happens when you don’t manually partition a disk. In the mean time, I’ll reinstall that way.
I think the most likely problem is that you're doing something you're not telling us, and THAT'S causing it to break. ;)
Seriously, I have done this in general, with 7.10, on no less than 30 machines with at least 5 different cocktails of bios/usb/drive/chipset. The only time I've ever had a problem that couldn't be attributed to user error was when I actually had a bad drive.
Don't know what else to say. You're either still trying to do something the hard/”right”/wrong way, or you've just got some absolutely horrible luck.
Pro Tip : Drop to one of the background consoles to see extra errors not reported by the UI.
J/k about the “pro tip” part, that just seemed funny at the time.
AFAIK, if you can boot off of another USB installed OS, then this should work. However, the fact that partitioning is failing is far more suspicious.
Other note, it could be a drive ordering thing, but I think Ubuntu has moved to using the drive UID instead of the old clumsy path names.
If you think it's just grub, you can install it manually via another linux install. There are directions on how to do this under something like “grub recovery”. Grub, at the very least, would show you a nice prompt, since it's good like that.
BTW, I thought your site used le OpenID? Discuss doesn't seem to like me.
Looks like partition was failing due to using a USB cable that wasn't
supplying enough power. Grrr. While this application is mostly useless
to me if I have to occupy more than one USB port, for the time being,
I'm moving forward using both ports and the manufacturer supplied
cable.
(and, Disqus does support OpenID. It just does it TERRIBLY. Like,
really terrible. If they weren't so good at everything else, I'd
probably walk away just for this. I've mentioned it to them before.
They say they are fixing it.
Here's a link to the required procedure for logging in using OpenID
with Disqus…
http://revjim.net/2008/03/13/disqus-and-openid/
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/09/28/usb-ubu…
Worked for me twice, your mileage may vary.
I'm going to give this a shot today. Thank you.
I'm going to give this a shot today. Thank you.
Looks like partition was failing due to using a USB cable that wasn't
supplying enough power. Grrr. While this application is mostly useless
to me if I have to occupy more than one USB port, for the time being,
I'm moving forward using both ports and the manufacturer supplied
cable.
(and, Disqus does support OpenID. It just does it TERRIBLY. Like,
really terrible. If they weren't so good at everything else, I'd
probably walk away just for this. I've mentioned it to them before.
They say they are fixing it.
Here's a link to the required procedure for logging in using OpenID
with Disqus…
http://revjim.net/2008/03/13/disqus-and-openid/