I've been testing USB hard drive boot with grml-small-0.1y, and Michael has helped - thanks. It's close to solved, but not quite yet. The last thing I tried was a grml2hd 0.5.5 from http://grml.org/tmp/grml2hd_0.5.5_i386.deb which includes the initrd step. It failed as follows:

"There was an error running yaird for creating an initrd: create_initrd: 21: command not found: yaird. Sorry"

I begin to think grml-small is the wrong test platform. It lacks too many packages and documentation. (I need docs when all I have is a command prompt.) It gets frustrating to constantly wget and apt-get before I can run a script.

I wish to stop using grml-small. The only version of grml-big that I have is 0.5. I can install grml2hd 0.5.5 on that, presumably. Someone send email if you have any better thoughts. I am open to suggestions.

Thanks- Mark