Can not install F16 on USB drive properly(?)

[alexeik]

I have two laptops.
They are: Thinkpad T400 and ASUS eeePC 1015PX.
I would like to install Fedora F16 on USB disk - 500Gb and boot from this disk on both systems.
So the strange thing is:
I installed F16 on USB disk using Thinkpad. It works on TP, but does not boot on ASUS laptop. OK. Then I install F16 on USB disk using eeePC - this disk works great on eeePC and refuses to boot on Thinkpad.

What did I do wrong?

I should add, that on Thinkpad I have windows xp installed, and on eeePC I have Fedora 17.

Could you please help?

---------- Post added 23rd June 2012 at 10:23 AM ---------- Previous post was 22nd June 2012 at 11:18 PM ----------

Sory, Gurus.
My explanation was not clear enough.

The problem is:
I want to have a portable USB disk with F16 or F17 on it. And I would like to boot from this disk on two different machines. And I can not do it. If disk boots on one machine - it does not boot on another. And vice versa!
Maybe there is a FAQ on this?

Thanks.

[JamesNZ]

Perhaps one of your machines is 64bit and the other 32bit? And what exactly happens when the boot fails?

[Gareth Jones]

Do the machines have the same number of internal drives? If not, the USB drive will have a different GRUB/Kernel device designation on each and the boot-loader may not be able to find the kernel. Make sure that you are using UUIDs instead of /dev/sd... wherever it is allowed to do so (unless you manually edit the configuration files, the installer should already be doing that though), and check the boot-loader documentation for how to deal with changing device names. It might be easier to use Extlinux/Syslinux instead of GRUB if you aren't already.

[AndrewSerk]

Since when you do a install, the installer installs packages specific to the hardware to which you are installing on, I would suggest to use a livecd image.
You could set two partitions on the USB and put a livecd img on the first with "livecd-iso-to-disk" and use the second partiton for data/storage.

[alexeik]

Thanks.

My understanding is that I need to go to grub2 documentation. OK. It takes time. I will update thread then.

Thanks again.