It took me a long time to get F8 booting properly from a 250GB WD MyBook USB drive. The references in this e-mail thread are excellent, but I was plagued by a problem with the WD drive falling asleep on me. I am using an HP dv9000z, which has an AMD Athlon64 X2 at 2GHz, with 2 GB memory and NVIDIA Go 6150. Ironically, it has two 80GB drives, one with Windows XP Media Edition, and the other has openSUSE 10.2 I am planning to use the USB drive installation as a "proof of concept" to ensure that F8 can be configured to work for me on a day-to-day basis, and once that happens, I plan to scrap openSUSE and install F8 on the second hard drive, and then use the USB drive for Rawhide/F9 experimentation. The keys to getting my USB boot working were 1.) using 'noapic', 2.) Poking a '1' into /sys/block/sda/device/scsi_disk:*/allow_restart and 3.) adding the following entry into /etc/crontab: * * * * * root touch /mnt/media/.stayalive; cp /mnt/media/.stayalive /mnt/media/.stayinalive The first ('noapic') allowed me to boot my F8 installation long enough to figure out that it alone wasn't enough to keep the WD drive from falling asleep after 10 minutes instead of halfway through the boot process. The second seems to help, but I applied it at the same time as I applied the third, so I now have to experiment to see what the conclusive fix is. The second fix didn't seem to work by itself, but I want to see if I needed to do a reboot (or restart something) for it to be effective. However, all of this did permit me to fully boot the installation, finish the initial configuration procedure leftover from the installation, and then have pup go out and get the latest updates. Note that I installed the Fedora Unity Respin 20071218-8-x86_64, and booted it into rescue mode to do an appropriate mkinitrd to include the necessary 'preload=' statements. I have since been able to get the latest kernel installed as well as create an updated initrd file, and am looking forward to completing the system configuration (e.g., ndiswrapper stuff). At the moment, I'm still having to manually enter the various grub commands, but I'm confident I can come up with a working menu.lst or grub.conf file shortly. <hr size=1>Never miss a thing. <a href="http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=51438/*http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs"> Make Yahoo your homepage.</a>