[NTLUG:Discuss] GRUB and USB drives.

[Steve Baker]

Well, thanks for all the advice!  I pulled out the hard drive (per 
advice - and for safety) - and the grub installer for SuSE 10.2 did the 
right thing without help...YEAAAAHHHHH!  I played with the grub.iso 
thing - that's pretty nifty too.

So - I'm up and running on a USB-only system and NEARLY everything is 
working.

The remaining issue is a weird one.

When the system goes into hibernation/power-save, it appears to be 
remounting or flagging the root partition as being read-only?!?

The system worked fine after I booted it yesterday evening - but I left 
it on all night and this morning, I couldn't write to /tmp or anything 
under / !!   The /home partition is still OK though - but with KDE and 
vi and everything else I use trying to dink around in /tmp, nothing 
worked well.   Rebooting the system fixed the problem and I was able to 
use the system just fine for over an hour.  Then I left the system on 
while I went to work - when I came home this evening, same thing - / and 
/tmp mounted read-only - /home just fine.  Running 'mount' doesn't 
indicate that things are read-only - but whenever I tried to write to 
that partition I got a 'this disk is write-protected' message?!   Once 
again, a reboot fixed it.

I suspect that the USB power is going away in hibernation or something?  
But the BIOS ROM on this HP Pavilion dv2000 doesn't have any power save 
options - and the SuSE 10.2 tools don't seem to expose the details of 
how powersave is handled and with the laptop running from the charger, 
it should be in "Highest Performance" mode - which (I assume) shouldn't 
power down the USB ever.

Any ideas?