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Old 02-27-2004, 07:31 AM   #1
scr02bcg
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Question Installing Linux on an external harddrive and booting from any computer


Hi All

apologies if this post is not well worded or is in the wrong forum but I am new to this.

I have been using linux for sometime now at university and have decided that it is about time I get an installation at home. Unfortunately I only have a small hard drive at home with winXP on and I'm not ready to remove this completely. What I would really like to do is install linux on an external USB hard drive. I have a number of questions on this so apolgies if some have already been answered before.

1) Is it possible - I see no reason why not as it will just be a dual boot system effectively
2) Where is grub/lilo installed? IS it on linux or on winXP
3) Assuming the answer to 2 is WinXP is there a way of taking the external hard drive to any computer, plugging it in and botting linux from it. I know one solution is that the BIOS supports botting from a USB drive but most don't. Is there a way of creating some kind of boot disk that you put in any machine that wil give you the option of booting from the external drive. For me this would effectively mean having grub/lilo installed on the boot disk but I could be way off here.

Many thanks in advance for all your help.

Ben
 
Old 02-27-2004, 08:00 AM   #2
dopper
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Most distros give you the option of installing the boot loader into the master boot record of your hard disk or a partition of of your hard disk (hdax) or onto a floppy. With SuSE 9.0 I just use insert a floppy disk when I want to load into linux on my gaming machine. I believe most other popular distros are the same.

You can always start an installation and cancel it at the part where you have the option to write the boot loader if you don't like the options it gives you. Always make sure you have backups.
 
Old 02-27-2004, 08:02 AM   #3
Oliv'
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yes there is a similar post in LQ: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...003/02/3/45831
and to answer to your questions: it seems it's not possible to boot from your external USB drive except if your BIOS support it
But what you can do is to have a tiny /boot ext3fs partition on your main hard drive which contains your kernel and bootloader and then mount your USB drive as your root filesystem
Also, grub is both installed in your MBR and in your boot partition (linux of course)
 
Old 02-27-2004, 09:23 AM   #4
scr02bcg
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Many thanks for the very quick replies. Allow me to clarify a few points.

1) Dopper - where is SuSE installed. On a partition on an internal hard drive or an external one. You say you can boot it from the gaming machine but Oliv says this is not possible if your bios does not support this.

2) But what you can do is to have a tiny /boot ext3fs partition on your main hard drive which contains your kernel and bootloader and then mount your USB drive as your root filesystem.

What does this mean practically?

3) There seems to be a slight conflict between answers. Could the same boot disk be used to boot linux from an external USB HDD from any computer.

Many thanks

Ben
 
Old 02-27-2004, 09:51 AM   #5
Oliv'
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1) Yes I say that because I don't think that grub can support boot from USB external drive... but if you find a bootloader which can do that... I'm wrong
2) When your computer boots, it loads bootloader installed in MBR (Master Boot Record)... Then you choose your favorite OS (linux of course )
your bootloader knows that linux kernel to boot is installed in /boot directory (in fact /dev/hda1 for example)... So the kernel is booted and once the kernel is booted, it has to mount root filesystem (and then other like /home, /var...). So if you have compiled your kernel with USB mass storage support inside, you can tell him that rootfs is your USB drive (you tell him that with the option root=/dev/something)
3) according my answer, yes but it won't really be a boot disk, it will be a root filesystem disk... unless I am completely wrong at 1) and so it will be a boot disk
 
Old 02-27-2004, 10:22 AM   #6
dopper
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I put the boot loader onto a floppy disk so it definately won't mess up my windows boot configuration. Then it only boots to linux when I have the floppy installed during startup. SuSE is installed on the same physical disk as my windows but it's on a seperate partition of that drive. SuSE only loads when I have the floppy inserted at startup.

I don't have an external USB drive to test your scenario but it should work the same with an external USB drive as with an IDE drive assuming your kernel is compiled to support large storage USB devices and you are able to install to it.

Just tell the installer of your distro to put the bootloader on a floppy disk and set your bios to boot from floppy first.

If your bios supports booting from USB devices then you can have the bootloader installed directly onto the USB drive. (that's also dependent on if the bootloader supports booting from USB) I haven't tried this method myself. The floppy disk method should work however.

Last edited by dopper; 02-27-2004 at 10:29 AM.
 
Old 02-27-2004, 10:34 AM   #7
dopper
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Save yourself some trouble and try this first

Try using knoppix (click the english link) if you want an easy way to use linux without messing up your windows configuration. Just burn the .iso image to a disk and tell your bios to boot from cdrom. You will be running linux completely from the CD and it won't mess up your windows at all. No hard drive is necessary except for temporary swap space. It will even mount the windows drives with read only access to your linux desktop automatically and detect all your hardware. You can change this to write access if you right click the icon on your desktop.

Last edited by dopper; 02-27-2004 at 10:38 AM.
 
Old 03-29-2004, 05:39 PM   #8
angelicus
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My try!!!

I have tried to install Fedora Core 1 into my external usb disk, but when I get to the partition part the program canīt detect my disk!!!!

One of my friends told me to connect the disk as a normal ide disk -> install linux -> then put it again in it's USB box -> change the bios boot device to the usb disk!!!
Doing this, when I start the pc, grub loads perfectly and I am able to choose the OS I want but when I start linux it give's me a kernel panic saying something like it cant mount the file system I think!!!!!

Can someone tell me what to do so the kernel can mount the file system????
 
Old 03-29-2004, 09:11 PM   #9
JayCnrs
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I believe that dopper's idea would work for you, just put the knoppix CD and then connect your USB drive to the computer and have knoppix use the USB device for saving your files and settings.
 
  


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