[Solved] How to force goflex home to boot from a USB flash?

[hasukuma]

How to force goflex home to boot from USB flash drive when a SATA drive is also attached?

I have had my ArchLinux running on GoFlex Home from the SATA drive. I wanted to boot the system from a USB flash drive and installed the system on a flash drive and the system boots just fine when only that USB drive is attached. The USB drive is recognized as /dev/sda. Now if I plug-in the SATA drive it would become /dev/sdb. But if I reboot the machine when both SATA and USB are attached, it won't boot.

I am assuming that when SATA is attached it may be assigned to /dev/sda. Is there a way to force the system to boot from /dev/sdb (USB flash drive)?

I have been trying to fix this for may days and have no idea what to do next.
Many thanks for helping me out.

[hasukuma]

Followed this post and it got fixed!
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=3355

Thanks a bunch to moonman for posting the steps!

I now have kirkwood as mentioned in that post.

There is only one problem after all this exercise, my MAC address keeps changing after every reboot. Is there a way I can change that behavior to use the original h/w mac address?

Thanks!

[hasukuma]

Ethernet address issue was fixed by following this thread
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=2360

Basically I issued this command
/usr/sbin/fw_setenv ethaddr 00:12:34:56:AB:23 (this is not my mac address)

Looks like everything is working as expected.. and I am closing this thread!

Thanks for all those who posted their issues and masters who helped them!