Re: Problems with booting from external USB drive



Mounting root filesystem
mount: error 6 mounting ext3
mount: error 2 mounting none
Switching to a new root
switchroot: mount failed: 22
umount /initrd/dev failed: 2
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init

here is the problem
it cannot mount the root file system (/) partition.
you say that it sometimes boot but other times does not, this is
improbable

if you do not change the hardware setup of your computer, the computer
will behave exactly the same way every time (at least it will boot up
the same way).
As you point out you have Fc3 installed on a external HDD, make sure
you plug in the external hdd before even turning on the computer.

If it still does not boot into the system this could be the problem -
Linux needs a "root partition" the '/' partition as it is called , to
use it it must be mounted before it can be used,
to mount this parition, this partition must be accessible to the kernel
, ie the corresponding modules ( drivers) for the hard disk must be
loaded.
Since you have a USB hard disk, to acces USB hd's USB mass storage
modules must be loaded before the root partition can be mounted, may be
the kernel is not loading them

also it seems you have no internal hard disk , is it true ?
also it would be helpful if you could tell me the boot paramters, ie
the grub lines in your grub.conf
there can be a lot of reasons this could be happening , please be
specific.
Tell us exactly what you do

.

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