I would like to run Linux from a USB2 HDD which I have spare. This seems the best way, leaving my Laptop disk fully partitioned for windows (I use it for work) as I don't have much spare space anyway, and then plugging in my USB2 HDD to boot in to Linux.

Now I know performance won't be the best, but it seems better than running from a livecd distro which really doesn't give me the ability to install and run non-standard programs.

The question is, how do I boot from USB? My BIOS does not have the option, so I am assuming that I need to install a bootloader which can give me the choice of booting from the HDD (Windows) or USB (Linux). Is this possible? Am I going to have to spend years playing with setup etc or is this a standard procedure?

Also is there a chance that the bootloader will mess up and leave me up shit creek without a paddle when I lose my Windows partition (and therefore work), or doesn't this happen?


Thanks,

Justin.

if you find out, let me know too please.

i'm not really sure, but (considering your BIOS doesn't have USB boot support) i think you'd need to boot a kernel from either the hard disk itself or your cd-rom before you can boot the USB drive... i don't think a bootloader (such as lilo/grub) on it's own would be able to boot a USB drive as it doesn't have any USB drivers... keep in mind this is just my assumption, i might be mistaken...

Very true, I was just considering the BootCD which then boots from USB, strange nobody has done this before, I searched the forums but there are just no leads on this subject, everything runs to a dead end.

cool, let us know how it goes...

BTW, i think pretty much any live linux cd could be used to boot your USB drive...

would a boot floppy work to get access to the USB stick?

i don't see why not, as long as the kernel the boot floppy uses has USB support...

there's several USB-based distros that let you boot from a floppy, for example:

http://www.ncsu.edu/project/runt/

http://www.goosee.com/puppy/boot2pup.htm

so i think it shouldn't be too difficult to make your own boot floppy or tweak one of theirs...

Whether or not you can boot from a USB device depends on whether or not your BIOS supports that option. If it doesn't, you're out of luck. I do not know of any workaround. -- J.W.

isn't the workaround to boot from the cd-rom, floppy, or hard disk - and then boot the usb device from there??

Yep

As a followup, I'm interpreted the OP's question to be whether or not it would be possible to install a Linux distro to a USB hard drive, and then to add Linux to lilo or GRUB in order to be able to boot to either Windows (from the HD) or Linux (from USB). If so, then to my knowledge, that would only be possible if the BIOS supports booting from a USB device. Note that this is an entirely different issue than booting up your system, and subsequently accessing a USB device after an OS has been loaded into memory.

However, I took a closer look at the links win32sux provided, and at least based on the descriptions provided on the sites, they describe a method of booting from a floppy, having the floppy load the USB drivers, then to continue the boot process from USB. That's a pretty clever approach, and although I haven't tried it myself, it seems like it could be plausible. (Along those lines though, it appears that one consideration might be that you'd need to run those particular distros rather than the distro of your choice - I'm not sure about that, but the documentation seems to say that)

If anyone has used these tools, please post back with your experiences. (Thanks for the links win32sux) -- J.W.

yeah, i posted those links more in the "proof of concept" fashion than anything else... i assume one could tweak those distro's floppies to make them generic... but either way, the main point is that it seems like booting a USB device by using a floppy disk is a non-issue as long as one uses a boot floppy that has all the appropriate USB drivers on it... one could even tweak the floppy or cd so that it will automatically boot your USB device without having to input your boot parameters every time...

please take everything i said with a grain of salt cuz i've never done this so i'm not 100% sure...

Ok, looks like it may be easier. I noticed on a reboot that it did detect and recognise my UBS stick and USB hard drive!!!! I thought that if it see's and reports them, it must have USB boot support.

I went in to the BIOS and had another look around, then it hit me, there is floppy support, but the laptop has no floppy! I then discovered that this menu expands, and my USB HDD show up in it!!!! wooooooo!

So, what should I do now, do I need to install a bootloader on my main HDD, or can I just boot from a CD, install the distro on the USB HDD (not sure it will be recognised?) and then set the bios to boot from the USB? Simply unplugging the USB device to boot as normal?

if your bios let's you boot from usb then you don't have to do anything to the internal hard drive...