Hello, I have a pretty exasperating problem with installing Debian onto a USB
device using the netinstall CD. When it asks for the GRUB boot loader, I told
it 'Yes' install it and it went ahead and installed on the hard disk /dev/hda
instead of /dev/sde where everything else was being installed to.
When I rebooted, I got:
GRUB Loading stage1.5.
GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 21
My MBR on my hard disk got hosed. That happened back in March...
Back then, after reinstalling Debian to fix the MBR, I used 'dd' to create a
backup of the mbr (which I think is the first 512 bytes on the device) and then
use 'dd' to copy it to where it was supposed to be on the bootable device.
That was how I finally accomplished installing on Debian on a 4GB SD card.
It went something like this:
>From a live CD beforehand:
debian:/home/user# dd if=/dev/hda/ of=/home/user/mbr.img bs=512 count=1
and then copy it to a USB flash drive that I mounted. And after the MBR gets
overwritten incorrectly, I booted from the live CD again and copy the MBR to
the correct device and then restore the backed up copy like this:
debian:/home/user# dd if=/dev/hda/ of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
debian:/home/user# dd if=/home/user/mbr.img of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
Well, when you install Debian on a 1TB USB hard disk, it is obviosuly a more
complex MBR than what fits in 512 bytes. And once again, I had to reinstall
Debian on my machine again...
Has anybody out there successfully installed Debian on a fairly modern USB hard
disk? If so, what suggestions do you have for working around this problem? Is
there some way I can view the MBR with a hex editor to find out the size of the
record?
I never bothered posting anything about this because back then because I was
certain that somebody would post something and it would be fixed. But I am
very surprised that 6 months have passed and this is still a problem. Thought
for sure this would have been fixed and now I feel guilty for not speaking up
then. I hope that somebody who has authority to file a bug reports does do
so...
Tim Legg
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