Since our 'mod' seems to be on holidays am starting the new topic myself ...

Kindly tell me how you boot from your external hard disk with seven partitions? I have an external usb hard disk with five partitions but am not able to boot Delft from it. Think the reason is that my BIOS doesn't allow me to boot from external hard disk. But then booting from usb stick is what I do every day. Do not see the reason why I am able to boot from usb stick but not from usb hard disk.

Regards

Okay, here we go.

First I need some infos.

* Can your BIOS boot from usb or not? I did not understand if you need the CD method to be able to boot the usb stick? Or do you boot directly from the usb stick?
Do I get it right: you can boot brom the usb stick - but you can't (onthe same computer) from the external disk?
What are the _exact_ error messages when you try it?

* Do you use the original Delft or a remastered/personal version?
If you are using a remastered one, it is very hard to find the cause.

* Did you use the _original_ install program from Delft to setup the usb disk, without changing it and messing manually with any possible bootloaders?
This is very important!

* What are the partitions on the external disks, how did you create them, which software did you use, windows or Linux? Which filesystems?

---> Please do the following.
Start the _original_ Delft CD (with the _default settings, without any add. arguments). - Now plugin the external disk.
Wait two seconds. Start a terminal. type:



Copy & paste the output here. Don't type it, please copy& paste.

* After you have plugged in the external disk, in a terminal type:



And post the output here, copy&paste.

* How many diiferent or same files with the name 'livecd.sqfs' do you have on the different partitions?
IF you have more than the one (from the original Delft) on the FIRST partition, the boot process can't work!

No, my BIOS doesn't allow me to boot from usb.

I am always booting from my usb-stick with the boot option 'fromusb'. (On my usb stick I copied only 'livecd.sqfs')

At home I am using grub. Following is my GRUB entry :
'
title MCNL Delft LiveCD
root (hd1,2)
kernel /mcnl_delft/vmlinuz root=/dev/rd/3 livecd=livecd initrd=initrd.gz nopcmcia acpi=on splash=silent quiet fromusb vga=791 keyb=us fstab=rw,noauto read-only copy2ram
initrd /mcnl_delft/initrd.gz
'
As you see. I copied 'vmlinuz' and 'initrd.gz' to a directory on a bootable partition (/mnt/hdb3/mcnl_delf) and copied 'livecd.sqfs' to the usb-stick.

On other computers I boot Delft using the original LiveCD and the usb stick typing "livecd fromusb" after F1.


Most of the time I am using a remastered version. I use the original version for making a remastering for my friends.

On my external usb harddisk there are 5 partitions and only /dev/sda5 is vfat. So I copied 'livecd.sqfs' to that partition. I am not able to use the _original_ install program from Delft since it does not recognize the usb hard disk partitions.
The first partition is ntfs, the other ones are ext2 or ext3, the 5th is vfat. I created these partitions with fdisk from within Linux.

Maybe this is enough for this time. Any comments?

Am aware my question "Kindly tell me how you boot from your external hard disk with seven partitions?" is not that important since I am able to enjoy all the possibilites provided by Delft. But I like to know ...

Thank you for your attention.

Regards

Bingo. That is your problem. MCNLive (in live usb mode!!) only supports booting from external HD:
* from the first partition
* with a FAT16 or FAT32 filesystem.
(The external HD can have as many partitions as you like, but mcnlive needs to be installed on the first )

This is explained in the live usb install program on the first screen. And here:
http://www.mcnlive.org/usblive.htm

-->

That's why you do not see the partitions in the live usb install program. It can't find a _first_ vfat formatted partition.
It is meant this way.

Copying the livecd.sqfs to the sda5 won't help (for booting with the _CD_ ):
* because the bootloader syslinux is missing, not installed on sda5
* and the linuxrc script (in the initrd on the live cd) does not look for a /dev/sda5

So, your workaround by booting from a bootloader installed on the internal HD is a good way.

Can only say : thank you. Understand now! Problem solved!!

Thought I had read all the documentation. I was wrong.

Once more : thank you.

Best Regards