Pogoplug Mobile HDD Booting

[credulitykills]

I'm having some trouble booting Arch Linux on my Pogoplug Mobile. I have a 2TB Seagate External HDD that I'm trying to boot from but just cannot get to work. I tried booting the device from a USB stick and had no issues. In both cases ppv4-install.sh runs without any errors.

So my problem is that I would like to use my 2 TB drive and I can't. I've searched, but could not find any definitive reason why some drives are bootable and some aren't. I'd appreciate any links/advice. As I see it my options are:

1. Get it to work
2. Buy a USB 2.0 hub and boot off the OS off the USB stick / mount the HDD after booting (would this work?)
3. Boot off an SD card (I can't find a post about someone doing this successfully)

At this point I don't care if I brick the Pogoplug, I only paid a few dollars for it and the point was to set it up as a Time Machine backup and rsync replication client. If I can't get it to work I'll probably just buy another Raspberry Pi and install Arch Linux on that.

In any case I'll keep screwing around and post if I come up with a solution, but any advice would be appreciated.

[moonman]

Try making a small rootfs partition (<20GB) instead of dedicating the whole drive to it. I know it doesn't work well with my devices, not sure if the mobile is the same.

[credulitykills]

Thanks for the suggestion moonman, I tried again with a 1 gig root partition (about 50% free after installing Arch Linux), but that didn't seem to work. I'm definitely seeing the downside to the 1 USB port Pogoplug Mobile