My day.

[theweaselking]

"No, when installing bootable Linux to your USB drive, you should have installed to sdb1, the 4GB drive, not sda1, the 160 GB drive.

Yes, that IS where Windows went. "

A little googling is a terrible tool, in the wrong hands.

Comments

[elffin.livejournal.com]

I didn't comprehend where they got the 160GB thumb drive from until alarm bells went off and I read sda1.
The problem isn't the googling; The problem is not understanding the process and then deviating from script.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

They understood the process: Find your thumbdrive's letter, do all further instructions on it.
They followed the script, and did every other instruction to the letter.

And they were left with a desktop computer HDD that booted USB-Ubuntu perfectly.

[rgovrebo.livejournal.com]

This problem should be going away though - kernel 2.22 seems to locate a SATA disk as hda. Lots of fun to be had when you have to mess around with fstab to boot your previous kernel version.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I've never had a problem booting from an SATA drive, except once in August last year when I foolishly tried to run Debian Stable instead of Ubuntu 6.06, and I learned that Debian hadn't gotten around to implementing SATA support *at all* yet.

Ubuntu handled it perfectly, however.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Unless you set the SATA controller in RAID or AHCI mode, it presents as a plain jane IDE controller, and Linux shouldn't care.

Of course, you don't get all the nifty bonuses of SATA when you do that, but you could run MS-DOS on a SATA machine if, $DEITY help you, you needed to.

[elffin.livejournal.com]

I tried, once, to install USB-Ubuntu from a USB-thumbdrive-booted machine ot another USB thumbdrive. I did all the drive-letter-deduction aforehand.

I won't be trying that again soon. It crashed the filesystem when I plugged in the second thumbdrive. *sad trombone* Waaaa-Waaaa-Waaaaaaaaaaaaahhh