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devuanuser

Member

Registered: 2019-03-14

Posts: 40  

Devuan Fails to Install on Usb Sata Disk

L want to use Devuan on my rackservers as it has syv init unlike the horrid debian/redhat  route of using the bug infested systemd that caused me so much trouble on my servers.
I am very glad to have found Devuan and will support it as far as I can.

My test system before dep-loyment is a pc with externa USB to sata converter with 1TB sata3 drive.
For debug purposes it is crucial that an OS must be able to boot from an externa USB stata drive. It is needed in my protocols. No ifs or buts even though all the rackservers is hotswap.

Question
USB drive has 15 operating systems in partitions on it for testing.
1) Debian, MX18, Fedora, Ubuntu,puppy,slack as an example all install to and boots from the drive. All were installed on the MBR of the disk /dev/sdb
2) There is somehow no way Devuan can be installed on an external drive such as this. Since Devuan is a fork of debian I cannot see why this should happen as Debian boots no problem.

After installation  I just get the error message as in this image

"http://tinypic.com/r/9u0pkl/9"

Anyone has an idea why this happens to only Devuan ?

If I cant sorth this out, I will have to use second best systemd free distro MXLinux which works like a charm, but I really want to use Devuan.

Dutch_Master

Member

Registered: 2018-05-31

Posts: 285  

Re: Devuan Fails to Install on Usb Sata Disk

Given the error and your info, I have a hunch therer's a mismatch between the UUID of the Devuan partition you used and the one reported in Grub. Obtain an 8 or 16GB USB stick and install Devuan on that (as sole OS), then try booting it. If that works, the problem is not Devuan but in Grub.

aut0exec

Member

Registered: 2018-11-21

Posts: 81  

Re: Devuan Fails to Install on Usb Sata Disk

Agree with Dutch_Master.

While I don't have other distro's installed on it, I do have a USB stick that boots a Devuan Ascii instance just fine. So it definitely can be done!

crankypuss

Member

Registered: 2018-09-15

Posts: 58  

Re: Devuan Fails to Install on Usb Sata Disk

Agree with Dutch_Master.

While I don't have other distro's installed on it, I do have a USB stick that boots a Devuan Ascii instance just fine. So it definitely can be done!

Easiest way to install on a USB stick is (imo) to install onto your main system, then blast the partition to the USB stick, and point grub at it.  The install software isn't all that great yet, certainly not in a usability way, though it's not as bad as an android app where you just poke-and-hope-iit-doesn't-mean-formatMe.  But it has gotten better since jessie, as i recall, and i assume someone is working on it now and then when they get around to it.

The USB stick i use for everyday secondary-backup is bootable and has devuan-ascii on it along with debian-jessie.  The SSD that's my tertiary backup also lists ubuntu-oneiric-32 since that's where i stopped development on something i didn't want to discard.  Multi-boot on a MSDOS partition format is basically dead simple, unless you have a bitchy-POS like the Dell XPS13, the BIOS of which enforces Windows-y requirements for booting off a primary partition or something like that, because Microsft wanted it that way for Windows.

hth