Ok, I'll try to include all relevant details. I have a Dell Inspiron 1420. It has a 160 GB ATA drive that came pre-loaded with Windows Vista. I want to be able to run Linux, and decided that Fedora was probably the best way to go. However, the wife wants to maintain Vista, so I thought the best thing to do was to install into our Seagate 160 GB external USB hard drive.

The first thing I tried was to use QTParted with my Knoppix 5.1 Live CD to have two partitions on the external drive: sdb1 stayed in fat32 with 140 GB, and sdb2 I set at first to fat32, but I couldn't install with that, so I tried setting it to ext3, and that installed fine. This is the remaining 20 GB.

After I set the BIOS to boot from USB first, the computer refuses to recognise the external drive as a bootable medium. So I have now repartitioned the whole drive: sdb1 is 20 GB in ext3, then I had a swap partition with the next 20 GB, that insists on being sdb3, and tried to use the last 120 GB as fat32 so I can continue to use the external drive as Windows data backup. Unfortunately, when I tried to install Fedora this time, I got to the same point (just after customising everything and setting a root password) where it says it has encountered a bug and cannot continue. This is the same place I encountered the bug when trying to install to fat32 file system, but I'm currently trying to install to ext3, so that can't be the problem. Unfortunately, when I try to save the error file, it says it's not able to save, so I can't even offer that information.

I'd like to avoid trying to make a dual boot system on the same ATA hard drive if possible, but I'm beginning to wonder if I may have to resort to that after all. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I hope I've offered enough pertinent info. If not, let me know what you need and I'll be happy to provide it.

boot into gparted and make sure that the boot partition on the external drive is flagged as such.

Ok, I used gparted, and verified that the partition was flagged to boot. I went ahead and reformatted the partitions, just to be sure, and even went so far as to put the boot partition in ext2, thinking that may make things easier. I was able to get Fedora to install, but when I tried to boot, it simply reads "GRUB" in the upper right of the screen, and then stops. It does nothing else, and is unresponsive to anything I do.

It looks like it's waiting for input from me, but it doesn't respond to any input, and it doesn't do anything else. Am I missing something?

You now have Fedora installed on the external drive? You said earlier that you can't boot from the external

so you will need to boot from the internal drive. You can install Grub (part of it) to the mbr on the internal drive or you can change the vista boot files to boot Fedora from vista. If you want to do the latter, I would suggest you download Easy BCD from neosmart technology to use to modify your vista bootloader http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

Can't be more specific as I don't know your partition structure.

I don't know what was wrong before, but now it seems to be recognising the external drive, after I used gparted on it.