External USB hard drive

jhmorris47 · 04-12-2004, 05:56 PM

Is it possible to boot Fedora or any linux distribution from a USB external hard drive? Any help is greatly appreciated.

nhs · 04-12-2004, 08:53 PM

As far as I know it isn't possible to direct the BIOS to boot from a USB hard drive directly however there are some distributions (e.g. MandrakeMove) which use a bootable CD/Floppy to boot and then run some or all operations from a USB hard drive.

ekman · 04-13-2004, 11:59 AM

Yes, I am doing it. It requires BIOS support for booting from USB device. Hoto at;
http://www.freewebs.com/tsj/bootingUSB_ldp_v0.1.htm
Warning; the Fedora installation could not find the external disk. You are given the option
to specify drivers to the installation, I tried both USB and Firewire. None worked.
I now run Gentoo.
/L Ekman

zidane2010 · 04-13-2004, 04:33 PM

i know that with a NForce2 motherboard, you can boot from USB devices. however, it may be hard to install because of usb2.0 drivers :S

Thymox · 04-13-2004, 05:47 PM

If your BIOS supports booting from a USB drive then you should be at least 1/2 way there. Alternatively, you will need to create a boot-floppy or an "initial ram disk" (initrd) that will start your USB services and find the USB harddrive.

saikee · 12-10-2005, 09:01 AM

A distro that can be installed into and booted from an external USB hard drive is Puppy. Just did it myself when Slax and Damn Small Linux failed. I think the kernel and the loading process needs to slow down to match the slow response from the USB cable so it should not be possible for every standard distro.

MrUmunhum · 05-02-2006, 04:14 PM

64.124.13.3/hacks/USB_Boot_using_GRUB.html