making a WD My Book external USB drive bootable

gregmcavoy · 12-29-2007, 03:18 PM

Greetings,

I'm running a LAMP machine with Debian and php4.4. I need the ability to run LAMP with php5.x in addition, but not all the time. My hope is to set up a Windows machine to, when needed, boot instead to Debian. I have a WD 500GB My Book external USB drive and want to configure it to be bootable (with grub?). I ran the Debian 4 netinst CD and was able to get the USB drive all set up--except I get a non-specific error when I try to install grub (or lilo) to /dev/sdb0 (which mounts as the root folder) from netinst. Can this be done? What's the process? Many thanks!!

fastTalker · 01-03-2008, 09:12 PM

can you not just add an entry to your grub list for your usb drive?

something like this. assuming your usb drive shows up second.

Code:

title    Windoze
map      (hd0) (hd1)
map      (hd1) (hd0)
root     (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

i believe there are ways to use php4 and php5 in parallel. i'm sure you can find plenty on google about that.

or if you are using apache 2 you can just enable and disable the modules with the following commands as you need. (assuming you have the php4 and php5 packages installed.)

Code:

$ a2dismod php4
$ a2enmod php5

or

Code:

$ a2dismod php5
$ a2enmod php4

afterwards restart apache

Code:

$ /etc/init.d/apache2 restart