Inslaling Linux (Red Hat) on an USB hard drive

[Hot'n'Chilly]

I want to install a copy of Red Hat Enterprise 64-bit on a USB Western Digital mini hard drive. I went through with the install, setting it as "hdc" in the install (my bios recognize the usb hard drive as an "hd" rather than an "sd"). Everything seemed ok with the install, but when it came to boot, it failed to load correctly and dumped me into the command line GRUB. I tried to issue the normal boot commands, but to no avail, I was stuck.

What went wrong here? Is it a problem with the mapping of the hard drives and partitions? I have a suspicion that it could have something to do with the drive order (must I set the USB drive to the primary drive in the motherboard bios rather than the third?). I also am not sure if this problem could be caused by my motherboard recognising the USB hard drive as an "hd" and not the usual "sd". Then finally, I have heard that it could be a problem associated with the 64-bit RHEL and my AMD64 processor (sounds unlikely though).

Point is that I have never done an install on a portable hard drive before and really need some help. The thing just doesn't want to boot correctly.

Thanks in advance!

[MuffinFlavored]

Provide the errors you got before you were "dumped into the GRUB command line."

:)

[Hot'n'Chilly]

I think it was something like:

Checking if 'grub/stage1' exists... no
Error 2: bad file or directory type


Hope that shines some light on whats wrong. On an interesting side note, I have a friend tell me that RHEL 4 had an issue with USB hard drives and that 5 may as well. He gave me the following link. http://www.bergercorp.com/assets/learnAsWeGo/instRHEL4onUSB.pdf
Not sure if this is at all related though, I'm rather new to Linux.

[MuffinFlavored]

I had the exact same problem. You need to have an initrd image for your kernel for booting. I was unable to boot without an initrd image.

[kiikkuja]

I think that the grub can't find anything to boot ie it can't find the initrd image and such. You need to tell the grub where to find them.

I found couple of links which may or may not be of use to you. Here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351) & here (http://www.sorgonet.com/linux/grubrestore/).

The Grub sees always the first partition/drive as 0 and 1 stands for the second.