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) ------------------------------------------------------------------------