External porable USB drive won't boot F16

[jrw1234]

After a lengthy battle getting Fedora 16 to install without a bootloader installation error, I find that the drive is still not booting (i.e., going to Windows 7 instead). This is of course after much tinkering with the options in the laptop BIOS regarding boot order. I've also moved the USB drive to various USB ports as well.

I'm not sure what else I can do.

Could it be the Iomega 500GB Prestige portable hard drive I am using as a boot device is not capable of booting F16 Linux?

[mwesten]

Originally Posted by jrw1234

After a lengthy battle getting Fedora 16 to install without a bootloader installation error, I find that the drive is still not booting (i.e., going to Windows 7 instead). This is of course after much tinkering with the options in the laptop BIOS regarding boot order. I've also moved the USB drive to various USB ports as well.

I'm not sure what else I can do.

Could it be the Iomega 500GB Prestige portable hard drive I am using as a boot device is not capable of booting F16 Linux?

It sounds like you are unsure if your PC is properly configured to boot a USB device. So, I'd suggest you use another method to accomplish that.

Any issues with the PC's BIOS boot order settings or USB boot support can be bypassed with a program loaded from CD.

Proceed as follows:

Download this file - http://download.plop.at/files/bootmngr/plpbt-5.0.14.zip
Open the zip file, locate the plpbt.iso file inside and burn that iso image to a blank CD.

Booting that CD will present a list of boot devices. When you get that, plug in the USB drive, select USB, and hit Enter.

If F16 starts from the USB drive that way, then it is your PC which is not properly configured to do that on it's own.
If F16 still fails to start, then the installation you did to external drive is bad.

[jrw1234]

mwesten,

Thanks for your reply. I am trying what you have described now. I will let you know how I make out.

Thanks again for your time and consideration.

jrw1234

[jrw1234]

I tried the plpbt method (thanks for that BTW). I tried dropping back to F15 as well I used the copy to hard drive option in Fedora, specifying the external hard drive. When I boot using the USB option in plpbt, it tries to connect to the drive and just hangs, clock stops working and "space travel" stops moving.

I'm not sure what the heck is going on.

[mwesten]

I haven't seen a PC where plpbt doesn't work when the drive one is trying to boot is set up correctly. Therefore, it looks like the bootloader did not install properly. I don't know what kind of battle you had with the installation, but it appears to have been unsuccessful. What was that about? If you can describe what you did, perhaps we can figure out where it went wrong.

[jrw1234]

Sure.

Background:

I tried several things so I'll stick with the latest. I went back to F15 Live CD ISO image because F16 Live ISO results in a failure to install bootloader message from the install process. (that was the first battle I was involved in)

The F15 Live CD ISO image installs the bootloader without incident so I stuck with that (grub vs. grub2 issue maybe?)

Here are the steps I performed:

1. Burned F15 Live CD ISO and rebooted
2. Chose the Install to disk (chose USB hard drive)
3. Followed the steps , replacing existing linux system/use all (tried several option), made disk bootable
4. Rebooted and put in PLOP CD
5. Chose USB option tries to connect and freezes


One thing: This drive has some sort of encryption and ini files that seem to show up no matter what I do to the disk (trying killdisk now). Could that be an issue?