I need to install and run Fedora Core 3 onto my 40GB Maxtor USB 2.0 drive without utilizizing the primary hard drive. At the installer screen which prompts to make a partition, it does not recognize any drives. (I unpluged the internal hard drive.) How do I specify to partition, install, and run any drivers which are required to recognize and install to my 40GB USB 2.0 Maxtor drive. (My BIOS can recognize and boot off of USB flash drives, so i can put boot loaders, kernels, drivers, etc. on it, but there must be an OS on the flash drive.) I have a copy of Knoppix, so I could use that if necessary. Also, I split my hard drive into multiple partitions, one unpartitioned for the Fedora OS, and one for a seperate FAT32 swapdrive partition. Please help

Skeptic:

I know fedora has problems recognizing USB devices during install, and my suggestion to people is usually to unplug all usb devices during setup. This is especially true for mass storage devices.

Since you want to install FC on your usb drive, this won't work for you -- but might help explain the problem.

Therefore if i were ever unfortunate enough to find myself in your situation (namely using FC again), I would look into installing it somewhere and then trying to image it onto your usb drive. But i'd be worried all the while that if FC couldn't handle the drive during install, it also wouldn't be able to the drive during boot.

--not very uplifting response, sorry.

IBM has a great section of their site developed to Linux (understandable to a computer-literate newbie). Boot Linux from a FireWire device - Installing Linux on Removable Drives should take care of it, though I've not read all the article. As for during the Fedora installation, I've found compatability complaints to be common in various forums, so good luck.

I had the same problem when I attempted to install FC3 onto an external hdd. You need to run the installer in expert mode.