[TriLUG] [corrected] Re: grub problems booting ubuntu from USB stick

[Tom Roche]

[Apologies for any confusion induced by the previous post--I got
fat-fingered--which is all-too-easy for me on the eee--while in
thunderbird. What I meant to send was:]

On Mon, 21 Apr 2008, Tom Roche wrote:
 >> Error 15: File not found

Joseph Mack Mon Apr 21 16:03:15 EDT 2008
 > the location of the disk/file is known to the BIOS, but won't
 > neccessarily be where the kernel will see it, after the kernel has
 > booted.

 > go into grub edit mode attacking each line of your grub.conf
 > paragraph. Use the tab key to see what grub knows about at each
 > stage eg start with

 > kernel (hd

 > and tab from there.

Thanks! It turns out that, with the internal SSD and a single external
USB stick in the eee, and using the BIOS' Boot Selection Popup to
choose the USB stick, stick={(hd0,0), /dev/sdc1} and SSD={(hd1,0),
/dev/sda1}. Unfortunately something in the eeeXubuntu install
(possibly user error, but I don't recall anything related) got that
backward, so the stanzas about booting from the stick had

root            (hd1,0)

and the stanzas about "normal" booting (from /dev/sda1) had

root            (hd0,0)

Fixing that from grub edit mode worked but was not persistent (is
there a way to make it so?) so the longterm fix was to edit

# when booting from the stick
/boot/grub/menu.lst
# when booting from the SSD
/media/Flash\ Voyager/partition1/boot/grub/menu.lst

as root. That's the good news, anyway ... not-so-good news in separate
thread.

Thanks again, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>