Install/Boot from External USB Drive

[gurrett86]

Hello all,

This is my first post to any linux forum. I have been all over the web getting into this new world. In the past few weeks I have tired several live cd's and many distros. One problem I just cannot seem to solve is how to boot linux (I really dont care what distro, although Ubuntu seems cool) to boot off of my external usb drive. One thing I find odd is my internal hd is always listed as "sda" not hda or whatnot...I'm not sure if this has something to do with it. I have followed countless tutorials on the net and none of them seem to work for me. If anyone would like to help me take on this venture I will be more than thankful! I really want to get to know Linux as I am starting to get bored with old Windows. I am running on a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop. Sorry if i am posting in the wrong place.

[retsaw]

What problems do you get when you try it? It helps if you can be specific about the problems you get, giving more details makes it easier for us to help you.

Your internal HD is most likely SATA if it shows up as sda rather than hda. SATA, SCSI and USB drives all use the sd prefix for the drive names.

When I recently tried Kubuntu 5.10 (should work the same as Ubuntu for this purpose) I got it to boot from a USB hard drive without much trouble, I think I followed a guide for Ubuntu to set it up, so I'd suggets giving it a another go with Ubuntu and let us know what specific problems you have. It may be however that your laptop doesn't support booting from USB properly unless you are able to confirm it does, support for USB booting can be a bit hit or miss, though generally newer computers are more likely to work.

[gurrett86]

I'm trying to use Kubuntu this time and I have booted from usb thumb drives many times on this computer. GRUB is not even read when the computer boots...it just goes right to loading windows xp. This is most likely a simple problem, but as I said I am new to this. Let me know if you need more specifics.

[gurrett86]

FYI...I was using this "tutorial" http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=80811 Everything goes fine, but like I said before I probably just have Grub messed up or in the wrong spot. Thanks.

[retsaw]

I assume you did actually install to the correct drive, which if your internal drive is sda and you have no other SATA/SCSI/USB drives connected will be sdb. If this didn't work, then you should get an error at the point of installing GRUB, perhaps the installer might hide this but it shouldn't, otherwise any other problems with it should show up an error as you boot and if it doesn't it is likely your BIOS isn't trying to boot from the drive.

Have a look in your BIOS and make sure everything is set correctly and be sure that it is set to boot from a USB hard drive before your internal drive. Even though it seems to work since you can use thumb drives, the BIOS may treat USB hard drives differently, so it may be worth checking the possible options anyway. Also make sure the USB drive you are trying to boot from is the only one connected in case a second drive is confusing the BIOS as to which drive to boot from.

Another thing to try is editing your menu.lst file for GRUB and increasing the timeout value to someting like 10 so you should definately see the GRUB menu, also IIRC Kubuntu used the "hiddenmenu" option for GRUB so it doesn't show the boot menu unless you press Escape, you can comment out or delete this line if you want.

[gurrett86]

Still no go..I'm starting to lose hope. No errors, just no option to boot off that drive. Any other ideas are welcome. Thanks.

[retsaw]

I can't think of anything else, I did find a guide to installing Red Hat Linux ES v3 on a USB drive (http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/redhat-fedora-linux-help/55519-installing-red-hat-linux-es-v3-usb-external-hard-drive.html) that was done using the same laptop you are using, so it must be possible to do. Red Hat Enterprise Linux isn't free, although CentOS is a free clone of it if you really wanted to follow that guide as closely as possible.

I would suggest however that you just make some space on your internal drive and install to that.

[ladoga]

If your laptop doesn't boot at all from USB drive when you have linux on it (and instead goes straight to booting windows) it might be that your BIOS support for booting from USB flash isn't quite complete.

At least this seems to be the problem in my case. My Thinkpad booted to MS-DOS from USB flash drive, but doesn't even consider booting anything else.

I don't have a CD nor floppy drive on my laptop so i had to install linux via network boot. (which was easier than i thought)

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installation_on_ThinkPads_without_CD-ROM_drive

[gurrett86]

It's just frustrating...I can get into linux with the suse install cd...there is an option to boot installed system and that works, just takes forever. Thanks for you help though.

[hard candy]

Installing Ubuntu To An External USB Drive (http://frontier05.blogspot.com/2006/01/installing-ubuntu-to-external-usb.html) he makes it sound easy. I think the key iis that the ramdisk (which is loaded in the computer memory first) needs to initialize the usb support right away so the boot process can start from the usb drive.