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I have a USB hard drive. (The USB connector for that drive is actually super flaky and disconnects if you breathe on it too hard, but I don't think that's the problem here.)

I have a laptop without a DVD drive, and only one USB port. (Actually, it has more USB ports, but they seem to not work. Hmm, why is everything broken? Come to think of it, the USB cable was my fault, but I think the USB ports came that way.)

I tried to follow the instructions here, adapted to my situation: https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/hello-world/.

In particular, I downloaded the bootable ISO, created a virtual machine in Hyper-V on Windows 10 (Professional), and told it to boot from the ISO and install to my external drive. The installation succeed and eventually I saw a pretty GUI prompting me to log in. I then shut down the VM and declared victory.

This turned out to be premature. When I try booting from my USB drive, the boot process begins, but it never completes, and doesn't even seem to get very far. It announces the name of the OS (in particular, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7), so it's not totally broken, but something is still wrong and I don't know what.

Mark VY
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    Linux was installed on a virtual disk saved on the USB drive? or installed directly using disk passthrough? – Noor Khaldi Jul 17 '17 at 05:42
  • Directly. I'm not that crazy. Just almost :) – Mark VY Jul 17 '17 at 17:45
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    What do you need to do? – niglesias Jul 31 '17 at 14:01
  • I would like to boot from the USB drive on bare metal – Mark VY Jul 31 '17 at 19:02
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    Probably the naming of the root device. vda vs sda. What virtual hardware (hdd device) did you use to install the os? – AndreasM Aug 03 '17 at 09:08
  • I would have never thought of that! And I can't answer your question, since I paid no attention at the time. Though I could do it again I suppose. Any idea what to do about it, assuming you're right? – Mark VY Aug 03 '17 at 19:13
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    Connect it to the hypervisor again and boot it. Then you can see which device was used. Maybe even lvm is involved, you can see the used device with "pvs" then. Another explanation is: The initrd doesn't have the drivers for the usb, usbstorage etc to boot from it. That would mean to reconstruct the initrd to include the drivers. – AndreasM Aug 04 '17 at 12:47
  • Suppose for now that your first guess was correct. (I'll check today or tomorrow.) Is there anything I can do about it? – Mark VY Aug 04 '17 at 15:10
  • Maybe add this as an answer. I haven't gotten around to testing this yet, but you're the only one who's given me a lead to follow so I think you deserve the bounty. – Mark VY Aug 07 '17 at 03:53

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