[ILUG] USB hard disk strangeness.

[Darragh Ó Héiligh]

Hello,
I'm new, but not that new.  although,  I have to admit, the same
concern passed through my head for a few minutes until I verified that
/dev/hda had the / swap and boot partitions.  My thinking is that if
for some strange reason, the usb drive has been written on for some
reason, it would at least be mounted in order for the data to be
accessed.

Thanks

Darragh

On 23/04/07, Gavin McCullagh <gmccullagh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, 23 Apr 2007, Darragh Ó Héiligh wrote:
>
> > FC6 will not boot unless a specific USB hard drive is connected.  IF I
> > disconnect it while the machine is running I get i/o errors.
> > I haven't got the errors to hand but the problem at boot up seems to
> > stop boot up before the kernel even starts.
> >
> > if I try to mount it it says the drive is still in use by another program.
> >
> > When I look at what's mounted /dev/sda1 isn't shown at all.
> >
> > If I try to look at the files within windows the file system shows up as
> > raw.
>
> If I didn't know better I'd say you might somehow have installed Fedora
> onto the USB key and the reason it won't boot without the usb drive is that
> the root filesystem is on it.  You would get io errors if you removed it
> too.  If windows reports a raw disk, it's possible it has been formatted
> with something windows doesn't know, eg ext3?
>
> This could be very bad news if you had data on that disk and it has been
> formatted and installed upon.
>
> > I would really like to be able to boot the system without the drive
> > connected but more importantly, I'd like to be able to retreave these
> > files some way.  Do any of you have any ideas?
>
> Can you check the BIOS to check what the boot order is?
>
> Gavin
>
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