Installing UBUNTU on to a seperate USB Hard drive
 

Installing UBUNTU on to a seperate USB Hard drive. I would like to install a Linux system on a USB Harddrive, so that I am able to use this with other computers. I am a novice with Linux and would like to know the procedure for placing the bootstrap. As the operating system installation procedures often place this on Cor hda, on a dual bootup. So what would I need to do to instruct the setup programme to install all on to the USB Hard drive?

I use the USB hard drive to back up my files from both XP and Linux. Will the automatic install keep these files in a seperate partition?

Or am I on the wrong track?

Any help most appreciated.

Steve

Usually if you install to a usb hard drive, you would put grub on the usb hard drive too, and change the bios to boot from usb, before the local hard drive. If you are using this on other peoples computers they might not be happy if you mess with their bios. Another option would be to put a bootloader on floppy or cd-rom, and use one of those to boot your usb drive. There are specialised bootloaders that fit on a floppy that are written for exactly this sort of situation.

http://www.weethet.nl/english/hardwa...omusbstick.php
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/fi...oad/23839.html

Here are a few links that might help....

As to your other data, I would back it up before I tried installing linux to the drive, as using Ubuntu's installation partitioning tools might destroy that data. I would then, when installing Ubuntu to the usb drive, create a seperate back up partition. If I wanted to access that data from windows machines as well, I would make it fat32. Then put the data back on after.

Best of luck...

David