help installing mandrake9 on external hd

[sc00byd001212]

I am completely new to linux, and i got mandrake 9, an external harddrive with support for both usb2 and firewire (I only have usb right now but plan to get a 4-6 firewire wire i need for firewire), and partition magic. I split the hardrive into 6gigs of ext2, 500mb of swap and the rest just for data that i already had on. How do i now install linux onto the hard drive?

[mdwatts]

See if Mandrake has any documentation for installing on a external USB HD. You may need to create and use the bootdisks from the diskette images on the installation cd.

Look for install.img and modules.img (the modules.img may have the correct modules you need for USB and scsi emulation support for the external drive).

The readme on the installation cd will explain how to create the install bootdisks.

[sc00byd001212]

thanks for ur help so far. In the images, there was one for usb, but i dont think i needed yet for setting uo a boot disk for installation. I tried just booting form the cd and installing to the external hardrive, and i think it worked. The only problem now is booting to the external harddrive. Someone told me that if i get firewire, then booting wouldn't be an issue, is this true? From what i have figured out, u can't boot to a usb drive first unless u get into something with "bootstrapping", something about re-writing the boot procedures. Or If u boot to something that has support for usb. Someone told me that theoretically i could use an existing mandrake 9 installed linux to create a boot cd that would include a kernal with support for usb. Does anyone know how i could go about doing this, or could point me in the right direction. Any help is appreciated

[mdwatts]

Have you searched around Mandrake's support/documentation site for any assistance on installing to a USB/Firewire drive?

Nothing in the docs on the installation cd?

Try a Google for Linux ( www.google.com/linux ) search for i.e. "install usb HD" or "install firewire HD" or other search criteria.