I am at present using a Win 10 pc and have purchased an external hd , MY Passport and would like to install Ubuntu 18 on it ?

How should I go about this ?

Thank you .

Welcome CYMRU,

Well hopefully you understand some things about EFI BIOS and secure boot. It would be helpful for you to update and tell other users what model PC you have.

The steps would be something similar to:

• Figure out if there are any issues with secure boot and resolve those
• Put the Linux install ISO on a USB thumbstick
• Configure the computer to boot off of the Passport drive as well as the thumbstick (even go so far as to remove the existing hard drive while you do this)
• Boot the PC off of the thumbstick, it will see the Passport
• Install Linux on the Passport
• After installation, verify you can boot

All of this depends on the model PC you have and the BIOS settings which you'll manipulate so that when you plug in that drive, it will be recognized as your boot drive, and when you don't, your original hard drive will be used.

Please update the forum with some additional information. Please also realize that while we can advise, we are all volunteers and ultimately it will be you who will solve this issue, along with some advice from members here.

Passport, A WD Passport external hdd, I do not think it is compatible as that is what i have ran into in my experiences, they are not set up for installing and running an OS, they are setup for storage, but you can try it, just install it as if it were a hdd. Remembering the dir letter depending on if you have one or two hdds in your Laptop so you will not install it onto any part of your windows OS.

if you find that it will not, as i have, then you should get a laptop internal HDD and the cable to hook it up to a USB Port then try it again, that works. I strongly suggest using UUID's for the external HDD via USB Port. With the Laptop Internal HDD's you do not need an external power source, it pulls it off of the USB Port.

(note: they may have changed that. It was a few years back that I was doing this, installing Linux onto every medium I could get my hands on, just to see what I could install a Linux OS on. You can actually install a full blown Linux OS onto a Pin Drive (usb stick) )

1 members found this post helpful.

I would just try it!

When the external disk (connected via USB3) spins up, does your BIOS allow you to choose to attempt to boot from it?
Not all PC's will.
If it can't be detected for boot via BIOS, you still have a good way to store backups of your data.

But if it can, burn an ISO to a USB stick and install Linux to the external disk, ensuring that you write GRUB to the external disk and not to your Windows disk.
Then you will have effectively a dual boot machine, controlled by which disk you boot off.

Random read/write performance will suffer on an external disk, but you ought to get around 50MBytes/sec for sequential access.

Simple answer.


Remove power and or data to internal drive. (it will remain as a windows drive)

Then install linux to this external drive.

There is no difference between a usb mechanical drive and a usb flash drive to linux on modern hardware. It is a hard drive to the OS and system.

Thank you Jefro , I will try that .

I've got a WD MY PASSPORT (2 TB, blue), and my system has Windows 10 on the internal 120 GB SSD (/dev/sda). I booted my live USB (Don't recall if my first install was Ubuntu or Fedora, but it doesn't matter), used gparted to blow away anything on the Passport and reformat it GPT, then UEFI-installed my Linux distros.

Thank you for the reply , mine is 1 TB .But I don't imagine that should make a difference.