Dear gentlemen,

I have recently Acquired a 250GB I/O MAGIC USB harddrive. I am trying to put UBUNTU & EDUBUNTU on it and every time I have tryed to install Ubuntu it tries to install but only gets to 15% then it crashes & I get the Error(Failed to create a file System) on the USB HARDDRIVE. Please help me resolve this problem.

Thanks,

JaDan

It's possible your power supply is failing. If there is a significant power dip especially during heightened activity like an install your drive will crash.

I'm asking myself if installing Linux on a usb disk makes sense. It is impossible to boot from a usb disk because the necessary drivers for usb are loaded after booting.
This is, as far as I know, because the usb drivers are in the kernel.
Correct me if I am wrong.

Newer puters have bios settings which include booting usbs...which then boots the mbr setting of the usb drive. If look into syslinux at http://syslinux.zytor.com/ there are ideas there. As well you could give feather linux a whirl and try out there floppy boot loader which is designed for puters without the usb booting option.
http://featherlinux.berlios.de/download.htm

Good luck

I'm not sure exactly how to do this, but I know how I've saw someone do it. Google only turns up references to Breezy and Hoary, but maybe those instructionns will still hold true for Feisty..?

Anyways, the only person I know that done this(on a laptop), removed his "Windows" hard drive, and plugged in his USB hard drive. He then booted the Alternate Install CD for Feisty, and went through the install process. Once it was all done, grub, etc, was all on the USB drive. He then reinserted the Windows drive. Now if he wants to boot Linux, he simply plugs in the USB device, and changes the BIOS to boot the USB device. If he wants to boot Windows, he changes the BIOS to boot the internal hard drive first, which loads Windows w/o loading Grub.

If I recall correctly, his issue was he was using a company laptop and didn't want to do anything to his main hard drive.

Edit: FWIW, the reason he went with the Alt. Install CD, is because it kept freezing up about 40% through. YMMV.

IGF

Running an OS from a usb harddisk seems similar to driving a car with an outboard engine.
Interesting gimmick but not so useful.

I believe the feature is for those with laptops having access to only one drive and not wanting to touch that other OS
A person could conceivably not even own a computer and have an entire operating system on a flash stick booted with a floppy or intelligent boot loader.

In the future..if usb sticks become fast I believe there would be a real market for people to plug in somewhere rather than carrying a laptop everywhere. This would only be possible if these plug in stations had some sort of boot loader scanning for boot images each time it activates.

The closest I've seen to a usb-travelling kit is Mepis's 'On-the-go' option at login. Carry a livecd with you and a flash (with a saved home directory). There is still limitation but you could show your photos, saved music etc.

Memory sticks represent a problem. After a few million writes to the same spot, they tend to forget what is written after a week or so. This is fine for Windows paging, for instance, but questionable for running an O/S.

I did the "take the laptop drive out during installation to prevent accidents". On a ThinkPad T41p and T60p, the F12 key brings up a boot list when pressed at the spash screen. I need to go into setup and just escape out, doing F12 again to get the USB drive to appear on the boot list. Then I can boot off the USB drive. Tastes great; less filling.

Mark

I have ubuntu on thumbdrive. Is great for those time when you need some linux tools to shell into a server, do an ldapsearch, do a website demo, or want to get your mail when away from your main workstation.

Create a partition on the thumbdrive with the label casper-rw, boot with the 'persistent' cheat code and keep your session info and anything you install on the usb for next time. Works better with 2gb drives if you plan on installing much, like jdk, office2.1, etc.

Even booting off a live cd with casper-rw on a thumbdrive will persist your entire experience to usb. Gimmicky? well, maybe, but rescue one system with it and its all worth it.

NullT