I have to install it to a USB drive...I have no choice.

Primary drive has loads of important XP programs.
Slave drive has about 80 gigs worth of files. Already has 4 partitions but the two I can use have bad blocks.

I have a nice new 80 gig USB drive, already partitioned and planned out...but Anaconda doesn't see it.

If you can help me, please keep in mind that due to said problems, I haven't exactly had much ability to experiment with linux seeing how if I installed much more than the defaults it'd fall into bad block territory and bork the system.

How do I install Linux to my USB drive? Details, please...

OR, if there's another free distro (which uses gnome) that doesn't give me a hard time installing to a USB drive, what is it? <--- best option

OR again, if there's a way I can keep / down to say 1.5 gigs then install the rest on the new HD, how do I do this?

Oh, and advice to everyone, don't be cheap like me and buy a SimpleTech drive. =p You'll be sorry.

sary

P.S. On a separate note, in my partitioning, should the * partition be /boot or / ?

bump...can't possibly be the only one ever needing to do this...

First off: per the LQ Rules Please do not bump your posts until 24 hours has passed. You were 11 hours 39 minutes early. Secondly, feel free to use the LQ Search feature. Here are my results using it.

Sorry about the bump thing...

...but I HAVE been searching! But I always hit a roadblock...the only article in your search that remotely involved my situation was the "mounting a usb drive" one...and geez, I can't even do that. which now gives me another question in a hopelessly frustrating crusade to have Linux...

I can't even mount my disk, I get the old:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda3, or too many mounted file systems.
My fstab line is:
/dev/sda3 /mnt/usb ext3 user,rw,noauto 0 0

I'm pretty sure it's ext3. It's whatever "Linux" is when I ran sfdisk.

Anyway, back to "I am searching", this has been majorly frustrating because I can't get any help here and the same crap happens to others on the web.

One piece of information was something like "install in expert mode with a driver disk". I have no clue how to make such a disk. Roadblock.
Another two people were stopped right away by people saying "It's highly recommended that you don't install to a USB blah blah..." This is Linux, people like that shouldn't exist in a community about an advanced OS.

Of course, I'm stuck because I couldn't get help isolating my bad blocks either, and anaconda's not gonna do it. Tried about 10 different instructions on this one from friends and searches. I gave up on it and bought the new HD. I'm NOT spending hundreds for a new computer for this...I'm not made of money.

Sigh, sorry for the rant, but I've spent a good 50 hours that I don't really have (school, work) trying to tackle this problem. I'm majorly frustrated...

sary