Linux and external harddrives

[DragonFire]

If a motherboard supports booting from a external usb drive, can one install and boot Mandrake or Redhat from it while dual booting XP from a internal harddrive?

 

[n0cmonkey]

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=34&threadid=1332287&highlight_key=y&keyword1=external

 

[DragonFire]

You know for reason I couldn't find my first thread so I started a new one, sorry about that but at the same time, no one really answered my question other then sure it can be done.

How would I go about doing it?

I have XP installed on the internal drive. Would it as simple as booting from the linux cd, install it to the external and the install the boot loader onto the XP drive? Would the loader still work even if the external drive wasnt present? Even tho the my internal drive with XP would be the boot drive from a bios point of view, could I put the boot loader on the external so I dont have to worry about messing up XP if I need to remove it?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Use the XP loader to boot linux. Then you don't have to worry about the external drive being connected.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: DragonFire
You know for reason I couldn't find my first thread so I started a new one, sorry about that but at the same time, no one really answered my question other then sure it can be done.

How would I go about doing it?

I have XP installed on the internal drive. Would it as simple as booting from the linux cd, install it to the external and the install the boot loader onto the XP drive? Would the loader still work even if the external drive wasnt present? Even tho the my internal drive with XP would be the boot drive from a bios point of view, could I put the boot loader on the external so I dont have to worry about messing up XP if I need to remove it?

It should work. I don't know many people that do boot from external drives, and I know I don't.

It might also depend on your BIOS if it supports booting off of a external drive, or at least is aware of external drives itself. You may have to make a Linux "boot" partition on your internal drive, it doesn't have to be big, just a 100-200 megs should be more then enough.

Generally the drive gets treated as if it's a SCSI drive, so it would be /dev/sda vs /dev/hda that would indicate a normal internal IDE drive.

The bootloader probably won't work without the linux drive being present, however you can make the Windows NTLDR boot into Linux if you want. There are a few howtos on how to do that on the internet.

But if your a Linux newbie, it would probably be best just to use another internal harddrive. There is enough to learn without messing around with stuff like that.

If it works it would be easy, but if it doesn't it may be hard to figure out how to fix it.

 

[DragonFire]

Well I'm a newbie but not completly as I have played around with linux in the past. I reason why I thought about a external is because I wouldnt mind trying the lastest version of mandrake but I dont want to have to put my cd-rom drives on the same cable in order to install a 2nd harddrive, perhaps Im just being silly...

 

[drag]

You not being silly. It's a good idea, but it just make things a little bit more complicated.


If it works it works, if it doesn't it doesn't. Most distros have good support for external drives, so if you make a rescue CD for your WinXP installation so you can recover the bootloader if you get tired of messing around with it.

Also watch your /dev/hd** names so that you don't accidently format your windows installation.

Check out the forums of your Distro of choice, they would have more specific information probably about weither or not the installer can handle that sort of thing.

 

[Haden]

I'm not sure, but I don't think it will work right away.
Kernel needs to have USB support built-in (not usual for most distros), plus, which is bigger problem, it takes some time (several seconds) for USB subsystem to find attached devices - kernel will not wait and it will panic that root can't be mounted.
I've faced these problems when installing Debian to 128MB USB stick, internet sources suggest using initrd with sleep, but I made minor changes in kernel instead (with great success).

 

[TechBoyJK]

i always thought it would be cool to make a "key" out of something like a usb key chain drive, where you could use that for the basic os, and the internal hard drives as data storage. If the OS gets corrupted, just insert a fresh key. I know my mb will let me boot from one, I just don't know enough yet to make one.