Booting from USB and other problems...

[Jason Montleon]

I was under the impression Fedora 6is  supposed to support booting from 
external USB drives?  It does work, but I had to boot from the rescue CD and 
use mkinitrd to create an image with the required modules using the 
--preload option for ehci-hcd usb-storage and scsi_mod, otherwise the boot 
process would end early on in a kernel panic, unable to mount the root 
partition.

I had to do the same to get the systems promise sata controller working, 
with the libata and sata_promise modules.

Of course, the first thing I did after this was update the system which 
installed kernel 2849.  And I had to do the same.

Also interesting was the fact that the 586 kernels installed by default on 
the system, even though it is a 3.6 GHz P4 (Alienware M7700 laptop).  Any 
reason that this would happen?  I ended up downloading manually the 686 2849 
rpm, uninstalling the 586 version, installing the 686 version, and then 
rerunning mkinitrd to get the system to boot properly from the external 
drive.

Third time was a charm...