Hello, I am a complete beginner at Linux, so please bear with me.

I want this USB external hard drive, a WDC 250GB (branded Acomdata), to become my "portable office", as I switch between three or four computers very frequently. To be able to just plug this into a computer, modify some BIOS boot settings and start working, is very important to me.

I have installed Linux on an external hard drive using a Live CD. I followed pretty much all the in the installer, only at the last step (I believe it is when you are reviewing your install options), I clicked "Advanced..." and set the GRUB setting (I forget what it is now) to (hd2), my external hard drive.

My problem is that when I boot up the computer (ASUS motherboard), and when it boots from the USB external, I get a full screen of "GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB.." I have looked around to see what the cause of this is, and the result is that this was an Auto-Detect issue. However, I believe that with an external hard drive, this is not the case.

My BIOS has two settings for a USB drive under the Removable Devices category:

• USB-FDD
• USB-ZIP

I believe this is all I have done. If you want my menu.lst file or devices.map, just please ask.

I haven't looked to see if it is possible, but you might need to specify the device by serial number or volume name as the drive partition can change from computer to computer.

I haven't tried booting on another computer yet, that's step #2. In that regards, I thought because I installed GRUB on the external, it would always become (hd0) in GRUB's mind.

But the problem is, on the computer I installed Linux from, GRUB will not start up. It just repetitively prints "GRUB GRUB GRUB" as if in a recursive loop.

This should give you a couple of things to try to get it working properly.

http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/~quo...talllinux.html

That didn't do it. Sorry.