Installing Debian on External HDD
 

Hi All,

Want to install Debian on my computer here is the scenario what i want to do ..

I have an external HDD 160GB. I have 2 HDD already installed on my Sony VIAO computer, which is running on windows XP. What i want to do is Install Debian (which I downloaded from debian.org, 7 cd's) on the External HDD and when i boot the computer .. I should have option to either boot from linux or Windows.

Now, I have already tried to install Debian on the external HDD, problem is it recognizes dev/hd1 and dev/hd2 but these are both internal HDD in the system.. External HDD (USB2.0) is not recognized at all ..

Anyone who has done similar thing and get it working or any exp. please share it would be great help for me ..

All other suggestions/help most welcome.

Thanx in Advance to eveyone out there ..

-s

I had external firewire hd, but I think this works somewhat the same way.

What you need is to get usb drivers loaded before you can access the hd. Probably the easiest way to achieve this is by using knoppix as an installer platform.

Other problem is the booting. Are you sure your bios supports booting from an usb hd? If it doesn't, you need a small booting partition (containing effectively the kernel and usb drivers. ~20MB should do it) to one of your other hard disks.

btw. The external usb hd is probably seen as a scsi disk; that is /dev/sda

Thanx for the reply .. What kind of boot partition should i use which can load USB drivers too .. any suggestion .. and then i will give it a try .. thanx for the help