Maxdata laptop

On Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:34:51 +0100, Marco Pikiri wrote:
[color=blue]
> Hello everybody,
>
> I installed OpenSUSE 10.3 on an external 2.5" hard disk: the idea is to
> replace the one I have in my laptop with it as soon as I have solved the
> main problems I'm going to explain.
>
> Laptop is a Maxdata Pro 7100D X and it has an Intel GM 82855 video
> chipset.
>
> At this moment I have two questions:
>
> 1) *Stand-by*. Using s2ram without any extra flags it confirms my
> hardware is not yet fully supported. With --force flag it's able to go
> in stand-by mode, but when I come back to desktop there's a continuous
> glint of the screen. I solve this problem logging out from KDE
> practically without seeing anything and then relogging in. Any idea?
>
> 2) *Boot loader*. Grub installed correctly on my system, so that I can
> start OpenSUSE on the external hard disk or XP on the internal. If I
> turn on my laptop without external hard disk plugged in the USB port
> GRUB doesn't start, and so I can't do anything. The other way around all
> is ok if I plug the USB cable of external hard disk before turning on
> the laptop. This is a temporary problem I think it will disappear when I
> will change the hard disks, but until then can I solve in other way?
>
> Thanks.[/color]

On point 2)
The problem here, I believe, is that the external disc wrote the boot
loader to the MBR.
If you go into yast on your normal system and choose boot loader > other
and then select restore previous MBR you will be able to boot without the
external disk plugged in.
You will need amend your /boot/grub/menu.lst to include something like

###USB boot: Original name: usb###
title openSUSE 11
root (hd2,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-IBM-DTTA_-350840-0:0-
part1
initrd /boot/initrd

where you take the details from your external disk menu.lst
I omit the kernel version and initrd version so that I can update the
external build without having modify the entry.