Hello,

I am a newbie to Linux.

I have an external USB HDD. I installed SuSE v9.2 on it. Also on my internal HDD I have Windows XP. I want to load Linux whenever the USB HDD is plugged in, and Windows XP rest of the time.

At first as a boot loader I chose GRUB (don't even know what this is) and I chose it to be written in /dev/hda (my internal hdd, which has windows xp).

But when I restarted my computer I received this error:

"GRUB Hard Disk Error"

So I had to push in my system recovery CD and format my hdd.

This has repeated twice until I understood what GRUB is.

Anyway... Then as a boot loader I chose /dev/sda (the external hdd). But this time my computer didn't read the usb hdd while booting, and was automatically loading windows xp.

Fourth time I installed Linux, I chose again GRUB (which was a mistake). Then I chose system recovery for Linux. Then changed GRUB to LILO (on /dev/hda). This time I didn't receive "GRUB Hard Disk Error". But I got some "01"s on the screen. And for the fourth time I ran system recovery, and formatted the internal hdd.

And now I am scared to do all of these again. Can somebody please help me?


Thanks in advance...

Change your BIOS settings (press Del as the computer begins to boot) so that USB HDDs are booted before the machine's own HDD. Then install grub to the USB HDD

I already tried that but it doesn't work.

In fact there isn't an option to boot from external hdd. Options are:

HDD-FDD-CDROM-LAN


I have the latest version of BIOS (v1.20) and my laptop is a Toshiba Qosmio F10-101...

Any ideas for my problem?

Okay, so that rules out booting off the USB disk. That means puytting GRUB on it will get you nowhere. It'll have to go on the internal drive.

Now: When you say you set grub to /dev/hda - you don't mean you used "hda" in the grub conf. file, do you? Because Grub has it's own naming convention: /dev/hda1 in GRUB would be (hd0,0) for instance.

im trying to do the same thing with suse 9.2
has anyone tried to install grub or lilo on a floppy? i would try that if my floppy drive wasnt f%&*ed up
i also have knoppix 3.6 live cd(i know how to put it on a hd), ubuntu, mandrake 10.1, and fedora core 2 - but fedora doesn't have the option to install on /dev/sda so thats probly out of the question.
and i also cant install grub or lilo on hda coz im not allowed.
also when my computer boots up i have the option to press F8 to select boot device and my usb hd is there, or i can put it in bios as the 1st boot option.
when i press f8 what my computer seems to do is emulate that the usb hd is /dev/hda, but that only seems to be the case while grub is open, as soon as suse is starting up it doesnt like it and suse doesnt have /dev/sda for it to boot onto, maybe hotplug not started?
so if any of these distros are easier to go on a usb hd than suse 9.2 (which i would like on) please help if you can.