Booting from USB External drive always fails on 1st boot, 2nd always succeds!

[steve7233]

Error message from GRUB: Device not found. Rebooting results in no error message and boots normally. I just did a fresh install of 12.10.

[vinnywright]

is grub on the internal hard drive of the box ?
if so it sounds like the BIOS is not detecting the external hard drive on the first boot ,,,,, I dont have any external hard drives but I have seen this behaviour from bootable USB sticks before.

dose the box (BIOS) have a quick disk select key when first starting ,,,,,,like @hear I can press esc when first starting the box and get a options menu and one option F9 I think is to chose a drive to boot from ,,,,,,,if you do have some thing like this use it on first boot and see if it lists the external hard drive (of course if grub is on the mane drive you wont be abel to boot it but you can at least see if it is been seen on first boot or not.

VINNY

[steve7233]

is grub on the internal hard drive of the box ?
if so it sounds like the BIOS is not detecting the external hard drive on the first boot ,,,,, I dont have any external hard drives but I have seen this behaviour from bootable USB sticks before.

dose the box (BIOS) have a quick disk select key when first starting ,,,,,,like @hear I can press esc when first starting the box and get a options menu and one option F9 I think is to chose a drive to boot from ,,,,,,,if you do have some thing like this use it on first boot and see if it lists the external hard drive (of course if grub is on the mane drive you wont be abel to boot it but you can at least see if it is been seen on first boot or not.

VINNY

Yes and I already checked for your second question which is yes and its not listed and Grub is on main. I was booting from external last Kubuntu install. I selected my inteeernal on this install. I used to get the Sparse file not allowed error but I applied the work around that I found on Launch Pad. What can I do about the Device not found error?

[vinnywright]

not real shure what you could do ,,,,,my guess is that it(the external drive ) is not geting power (and powering up) untill the BIOS has allready mised it on the first boot then you do a quick reboot and it is recognized ,,,,,,but this is just a wiled guess.

maby you could give it more time to power up by disabeling fast boot in the BIOS (if you have that option) and just put up with seeing post screens and the sutch.

VINNY

[steve7233]

not real shure what you could do ,,,,,my guess is that it(the external drive ) is not geting power (and powering up) untill the BIOS has allready mised it on the first boot then you do a quick reboot and it is recognized ,,,,,,but this is just a wiled guess.

maby you could give it more time to power up by disabeling fast boot in the BIOS (if you have that option) and just put up with seeing post screens and the sutch.

VINNY

No fast boot disable option. I tried telling it to wait 20 seconds for the user to press F9 or F10 (boot options, BIOS set-up), but that didn't help. I am not sure it is the amount of time. Maybe its the electronics, maybe it doesn’t boot correctly the first time, but when you reboot from the keyboard it corrects itself, but that is just a guess.

FYI the USB drive uses an external power supply. Probably USB2, doesn’t give enough power so it needs external PS.

[Teunis]

I'm interested in what computer you use.
At the moment I run Kubuntu from three external HD's and an SSD, all USB-3 and with GRUB on the external drive.
I use Lenovo W520 and T430s machines with USB-3 ports and it works fine but thought to have seen similar only during the first few attempts.

[steve7233]

HP pavilion Entertainment note book US1030.

[Teunis]

I tried to find some info regarding a USB port that via the BIOS can be set to supply power while the computer is off, many laptops have such.
The specifications I found on line did not made me any wiser.
Such a USB port can be recognised by a tiny flash symbol next to it.

Plugging the disk into such a port and having it powered before any thing else might do the trick.