Steve, I would start over with ext3, and this time I would recommend using UUID as the drive identification method, as that method is resistant to the reordering/remapping that you're experiencing (UUID was introduced exactly because modern controllers may reorder drives on boot). ==Joseph++ Steve Holmes wrote: > Well, I have some more progress or updates on this problem. I still > can't get the thing to but from the USB external drive but here is > what I have so far. Sorry for the lengthy details. > > 1. I found out that when I start the HP laptop and use the boot menu > to choose the USB drive, grub picks up the devices in the opposite > order than what I knew them to be while running from a live CD. > > 2. So I reconfigured the menu.lst file in grub to use (hd0,0) instead > of the former (hd1,0). > > 3. When I boot now, grub starts up and when I pick the menu item, the > RAM FS begins to load. But then I get a message saying that it is > waiting for a device and after 10 seconds, it dumps me to an emergency > shell - probably inside the RAMFS. > > At this point, I could determine that the kernel was scanning devices > and was now mapping the internal hard drive to /dev/sda and it showed > the 4 windows partitions. But for /dev/sdb, no file systems! It > looked like UDEV was seeing the device but not able to recognize the > file systems. Yet, this very drive is what I installed the stuff on > to and when I run from the Arch install CD, this USB drive shows up > just fine. I thought I would try ext4 as the file systems on this > drive; I'm beginning to wonder if I should scrap the whole thing and > do it over with ext3 instead. I thought if Arch installer supports > ext4 when building that it should be able to boot with it. Is there > any chance the kernel wasn't built to support ext4 or something? > > Should I look for anything else? >