Hey all. A buddy of mine down the street handed me his bare laptop HDD and asked me to put Ubuntu on it for him. I understand how hardware gets recognized and how one can't put a hard drive from one machine and put it in another and expect it to work properly. The question is, I believe it would be possible to put enough data on the hard drive to be able to at least net boot it. If that's true, has anyone here ever placed a minimalistic amount of a linux installation onto a hard drive connected as external to be used later as a HDD to be put back into the laptop?

Thanks,
Loadedmind

This is basically the same as putting Linux on a USB drive and expecting it to work, which evidently is possible. I would look at the Ubuntu web site for instructions on installing Ubuntu on a USB drive.

linux checks the hardware on every boot, so in theory at least, you can put a full install
onto that HDD & return it to the original lappy.
& expect it to work. It would be nicer, if the two were similar, or the same model.

Since Debian and Ubuntu support installing from the hard disk, You could always throw the iso on the hard drive so when he boots the system the install would start..
http://deepbluespaces.blogspot.com/2...hard-disk.html

just to add another option.

Thanks all!

I've done this before(not with Ubuntu), and it worked fine.