I am running Ubuntu Hardy on a laptop and I need to get an external hardrive as I need some more space. I have looked at the posts in forums and done a search on google. I have found very different advice, on some it says I need to physically switch my current internal hard drive off before installing linux into external hardrive. I wouldn't feel comfortable doing this on a laptop. Is this really required? The advice, as most of what I found, refers to people who are running windows on main computer and want to have linux in external hardrive. I however already have only linux on my laptop and I just want to add an external hardrive. Could someone advice me how to go about it or point me towards any already existing guide?..and does any external hardrive work or do I need a particular type to work with Linux?

Not sure if this info is need for advice, but this are my system monitor details:

Laptop
Ubuntu 8.04
Kernel Linux 2.6.24-22 generic
Hardware:
memory 725.4 MiB
processor: Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R)4 CPU 2.80GHz
Available disk space: 20.9 GiB

Thanks. I hope this is the right place for post, I have tried to find this info before asking, sorry if I've missed it.

I believe all you need to do is purchase a USB external HDD and plug it in. I know that Hardy auto mounts most devices.

Hi SkinnerC,

Thanks for replying...so it's all much simpler than I thought, as an inexperienced user I always expect everything to be complicated i guess ; ) ...If all I need is to plug the external hdd in this would certainly save me a big headache as I was dreading the instruction about physically touching my hdd...can i use any external hdd?..i don't know if all external hdd work with Linux or whether this is a very silly question indeed? bear with me, i'm learning : )

thanks again.

Every external usb HD will work in linux.
It will be mounted automatically, and you are ready to go.

Thank you repo, nice to get confirmation before going ahead...sometimes things are easier than I anticipate, and that's great : )
cheers

Linux isn't able to repair the NTFS filesystem, so if you get an external drive, you might want to reformat it in a native Linux filesystem such as ext3.

Most external drives are formatted as fat.
Best to leave it this way so they can be used fo linux and windows.

When you go to install Ubuntu on your external HDD, I would recommend clicking the "advanced" button near the end of the installation, and specify to have Grub installed to /dev/sdb or whichever is the external drive. If you don't do that, Grub by default gets installed to the MBR of your internal drive (/dev/sda); it sounds like you want to keep your HDDs independent of each other, which is a really good way of doing it, so you'll want to make sure you specify where Grub gets installed. Anyway, good luck and let us know how it goes.