[arch-general] Booting issues

[Chris Brennan]

Greetings! Just to give everyone a clue, this is not my first go-around
with Linux, I'm an old hand of sorts, but this is my first time using
ArchLinux, so please bare with me here.

My target install is an Asus A53E laptop (re-modeled K53E) and I am
installing to an external USB Hard-Drive. The hard-drive is a 750GB
Seagate 2.5" SATAII drive in an external enclosure. The target arch is
x86_64.

I stepped though the install without incident, it moved along
flawlessly, I accepted all the defaults and the dual-arch install
preformed as intended. The problem arose when I went to reboot for the
first time. Now, this laptop behaves strangely in that I can't just go
into the BIOS and change the boot order to the external (it does not show
up at
all there, just the internal hard-drive and the dvd-ram) and everything
stays
the same, things truly are dynamic in this machine. I have to hit escape at
the
'ASUS' boot logo (which I cannot turn off for the life of me!) several
times,
just to get the BBS menu to appear, from there, I can select the external,
now
once the external is selected I am presented with the grub menu as
expected, I
select the first menu option to boot the standard kernel and then it would
immediately fail saying it couldn't read from a FAT partition, I was like
WTF!?! It took me a little while to realize that I had to change the root
entry
from (hd1,0) to (hd0,0), once I figured that out (about 5 reinstalls later)
I
got the message stating it was booting from the kernel, then it would
immediately drop me to the recovery shell. This was WTF!?! moment #2. The
first
thing I did was to snoop /dev and all I could see was /dev/sda1-3. WTF!?!
Moment #3! So I rebooted to the cd, remounted and chrooted into the new
environment and rebuilt my CPIO archive (by far this was the easiest part!),
after it was done, I rebooted again, no dice! I still get dropped
immediately
to the recovery prompt, and I still have no sdb (which is where the
installer
sees the external when on the install cd).

So I am at a loss as to what to do now. I spoke with a few people over at
freenode/#archlinux and a john_f suggested that my issue may be related to
the
fact that this laptop is USB3 .... so WTF then, what am I missing in my cpio
archive that is present in the installer image (which can see my external
just
fine!)

I copied some files from the chroot environment to my local web-server

http://69.116.93.166:2500/~chris/nix/arch/

If you have any more/other questions please don't hesitate to ask.
> --

> Chris Brennan
> A: Yes.
> >Q: Are you sure?
> >>A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
> >>>Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?
> http://xkcd.com/84/ | http://xkcd.com/149/ | http://xkcd.com/549/
> GPG: D5B20C0C (6741 8EE4 6C7D 11FB 8DA8  9E4A EECD 9A84 D5B2 0C0C)
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