This isn't really Linux related, well, it is, but... let me explain.

I plan to purchase a Freecom (USB) external HDD. My motherboard has support for booting USB devices, however, before purchasing I would like to know if anyone has experience with successfully booting said drive?

I know there are others (I would've posted a link to the thread but the board software prohibited me to do so as this is my first post) who have experienced problems in doing so...

On this external HDD I intend to install Ubuntu (6.10), the plan is to install the boot loader on the external drive itself, thus when disconnected it poses no issues. The drive itself will be connected to only one computer so there shouldn't be any issues with hardware detection or the like. Am I right in assuming that this will work?

Thanks in advance, Jamie.

Sorry to double post, but I did some testing with flash drives just now and I thought I'd post the results. For the sake of easy referencing, I'll number the drives, all of them have a FAT file system:-

1. 36mb (formatted size)
2. 123mb (formatted size)
3. 962mb (formatted size)

Now, within the "Hard Disk Boot Order" (or words to that effect) in the BIOS management, #1 was detected as a "Generic Travelling Disk" (USB-HDD0). That's exactly what I was hoping for and a good sign that USB-HDD boot is supported. I then tried the two larger flash drives which were not detected at all. I'm assuming it's to do with the size of the flash disk, which would make sense.

I have several options to choose to boot from, these are:-

• Hard Disk
• CDROM
• USB-ZIP
• Realtek Boot Agent
• Disabled

During these tests, the first boot option was the "CDROM", the second, "Hard Disk". Obviously, considering the larger drives were not listed under "Hard Disk Boot Order", this setup was not going to work. Out of curiosity I changed the first boot option to USB-ZIP, saved changes and exited the BIOS. Upon starting up, it appeared that booting from a larger memory stick was being attempted (a "NTLDR Is Missing" message appeared). I am unsure whether it was the 123mb flash drive, or the 962mb one, but that is irrelevant.

I have a hunch that I will not be able to boot a 250Gb HDD using the "USB-ZIP" option, I heard that sometimes the "USB-HDD" option does not appear until such a device is connected, is this true?

Do any of you have any ideas if it will be bootable? Thanks again, and apologies for the lengthy post.

Welcome to LQ. The ability of your PC to boot from a given device (whether it's USB, a CD-ROM, a hard drive, a floppy, or whatever) depends on your BIOS. If you get into BIOS and go to the boot sequence section, you should be able to easily determine whether or not your machine supports booting from a particular device.

Regardless of which devices your BIOS supports, during the boot-up process, the PC will attempt to boot from each device listed in the BIOS boot sequence, and in the sequence specified. If a given device is not present or not bootable, it will try the next device in the list, and so forth. As a result, if you put your CD-ROM as the first entry in the boot sequence, anytime you have a bootable CD in the drive, your system will boot from the CD, but if the CD drive is empty, your system will just move on to the next device that's listed (in my case the hard drive)

Regarding your particular situation, you'd want to select the USB-HDD option, and to be sure that the USB drive is connected to your PC when you are booting/rebooting. Obviously if you list USB-HDD as your first boot option, but neglect to plug in your USB hard drive prior to booting, your system will not be able to boot from it. In other words, in that scenario your PC will not just sit around waiting for you to plug it in -- be sure it's plugged in and connected before you try to boot from it