Booting from external hard drive
 

Hello

is there any way i could boot linux from an external hdd usb. I have pc without a cd rom and i would like to install a linux distribution on it (opensuse or ubuntu).

So could someone pls tell me how (if even possible) to copy the .iso on the hdd so it will boot, when i plug it into the pc. and also if its possible without having to remove the files i have on it(documents n stuff).

thank you

is the external hd fat32, ext2 or what?

and is it a usb or a usb-harddrive??

its possible, just need to know more info?
can the pc boot from usb?

You will need to check your motherboard bios and see if it will boot a usb.

The external HDD is a WD passport (USB) with NTFS. I did change boot priorities to first boot from USB. The motherboard is a P4I65G (intel).

But when i choose to boot from usb, the screen is black with a cursor on the bottom and nothing happenes.

on the hdd i just extracted the .iso of opensuse into a dir.

Your appraoch will not work. As far as I know you must install an image on the external HD (note that this basically will wipe all data of it). A tool that comes to mind is unetbootin.

Else you can give Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix a shot (it's already an image). If you have a 1GB (or bigger) memory stick, you can 'copy' the image onto it or you can also try to get it onto the external HD. Read the instructions here

Hope this helps.

i ereased the external hdd and installed opensuse 11.1 using unetbootin, but when i choose the disk in boot options i get a black screen with a cursor in bottom left and nothing happening.

i got a 4GB usb key which works now so problem solved.