[TriLUG] booting off usbstick

[Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG]

I want to boot off a usb stick on a usb connector internal to a computer, so I 
can use all the drive bays for storage.

o I can boot off a live usb stick attached to the internal connector

o I can boot off a SATA drive in the drive bay. This has the files that I want 
to boot off in the final configuration.

o if I dd the content of the SATA drive to the same usb stick that boots the 
live file system, and have no other disks in the system, the booting starts and 
gets as far as what seems to be loading the SATA drivers, and then crashes (the 
screen fills with what looks to be a dump of the crash).

I expected the files that boot off the SATA disk to boot just the same way when 
on a usb stick.

I've looked around the internet to see what the problem might be without 
success.

I note that all the bootable usb sticks seem to be live filesystems with root 
pivots and squashfs, all of which is beyond me. There aren't any webpages saying 
"here's how to take your current setup and use it to boot off a usb stick".

I expect the usb stick might have a different bios name (instead of sda, it 
could be sdb...). However I expect this won't be a problem till the kernel tries 
to mount /, in which case I'm expecting an error like "can't mount /dev/sdx on /". 
But I don't get that. Just for the hell of it, in grub I told it that root was 
sda, then sdb ... but they all crashed the same way.

I don't know where to go from here. I'd be glad of any suggestions.

Thanks Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant
map generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!