Hi ,

Iam trying to install linux on my external hard drive, but linux is not listing the external hard drive on the partitions list while installation. Could you please help me in resolving this issue.

Thanks & Regards,
Mahendra.

Welcome to LQ. Can you please provide some additional detail about the equipment you are using, and have you tried to manually mount any of the partitions on the drive? It may just be a case of those partitions not being listed in your fstab file (in the /etc directory) -- J.W.

This is a external case with seagate 160GB ATA harddisk. Please let me know what information you are required.

What distribution are you trying to install?

Some distro installers may not include the option of an external drive. I assume this is a USB interface?

Hi,

Many thanks for your reply.

I tried Redhat 9.0 and also Fedora core 2. My external case is usb 2.0. while installation, linux says USB driver loading, but the same is not detecting as HDD and not listed in HDD partitions. Is there any settings we need to do at kernal level ? as i have read some articles that linux will detect it as SCSI..

Also please let me know which distribution I can install using External drive, i want some linux to be installed, not particular with distribution.

once again many thanks for spending time with this.

Have a nice day.

Cheers,
Mahendra.

FC2 does not include USB in its installer. I have read that SuSE does but not sure about other distros

Many thanks michael.

I will try suse.

Thanks once again for your big help.

Hi,

Many thanks, Iam able to install suse linux on external drive. But now I have one more problem, while boot up, linux says "Waiting for device /dev/sda6 to appear...." and then it says "Not found".. and full error messages. I guess USB driver is not loading at this time, due to which it is not able to find /dev/sda6.

Could you please help me in resolving this, is there any kernal parameters required ?? would appreciate your help.

Thanks & Regards,
Mahendra.

I have the same problem with my USB drive and RedHat 9.
I have a maxtor in a usb 2.0 case connected either via PCMCIA USB 2.0 or USB 1.1 internal in the laptop.
When booting and using driver disks, the initial bootscreens give me the info on the harddrive, make and model and such. It tells me the number of partitions, but I don't see the harddrive in disk druid.

So the boot with drivers seems to locate the drive and partitions, but disk druid doesn't take that info.

Please help!!

btw. the stupid thing is, I could install redhat 7.3 using the same procedure, no problem

Hi All,

I got the answer to my question, but forgot to post it.. sorry for that.

In the intial screen, instead of typing ENTER for installation, type "linux expert"...
it will list external drive also...

Cheers,
Mahendra

Thanks!!

It's unbelievable how trivial the solution actually is :-))

Thanks, It worked exactly as you said

Marcel