Installing on a USB Hard Drive

[jm47048]

I want to buy a hard drive to use externally with my laptop. I have already tested my laptop with Knoppix and works great I just wanted to know how someone could install the OS on an external USB Hard Drive of 80 gigs or so, and have it not affect Windows. Basically, I want to set the bios to boot from the USB and it will just run off that drive, without knowing about the internal hard drive used by Windows.

Has anyone done this successfully? With this or any other distrobution?

[cc500]

I don't know if this would help....but first you would have to set your usb drive as first boot. If this doesn't work I have heard of setting your hard drive off and the computer will read the usb drive. Never have tried to set master hard drive off.........TRY AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!!!!

[Stevendefeij]

That is a problam my brother in law also encountered at the Graffical Lyceum Rotterdam.
(Big school with millions reserve)

It currently is impossible to boot directly to a USB harddisc (flash USB stick will work as well as memeory card Compact flash and the sort, but not a real harddisk.)

So you will have to make a boot floppy / CD.

You can probably use grub to install the bootloader to a floppy but I don't exactly know how he sees a USB harddisk partition.

normally u can use hd (0,x) but for USB I have no idee

[ruymbeke]

I want to buy a hard drive to use externally with my laptop. I have already tested my laptop with Knoppix and works great I just wanted to know how someone could install the OS on an external USB Hard Drive of 80 gigs or so, and have it not affect Windows. Basically, I want to set the bios to boot from the USB and it will just run off that drive, without knowing about the internal hard drive used by Windows.

Has anyone done this successfully? With this or any other distrobution?

Did you look in here ? http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11796
Works great for me since I use it now almost everyday with various Knoppix remaster I have done ...
Just edit the text file boot.ini of the ntfs partition and copy a couple of files (grldr, menu.lst,kernel, boot ramdisk and iso)
PS: only the grldr and menu.lst have to be on the XP boot partition, all other files can be on any other devices,
including your external hdd... An other option coud be to boot grub from a usb dongle, and all the other files from your usb hdd.
Hope this helps,
Gilles

[Stevendefeij]

That won't solve his problem.

You can't boot from an harddisk on USB.
You can boot from flash USB stick, memorycard , floppy, CD-ROM or IDE / SCSI / Sata hardisk

But not from a real harddisk on USB. (U could use a boot floppy or CD-ROM however)

At least not yet current BIOS-sen are not yet capable of that.

[ruymbeke]

...You can't boot from an harddisk on USB.
You can boot from flash USB stick, memorycard , floppy, CD-ROM or IDE / SCSI / Sata hardisk
But not from a real harddisk on USB. (U could use a boot floppy or CD-ROM however)
At least not yet current BIOS-sen are not yet capable of that.

If you cannot change anything on the host drive, you are correct and I may be off topic.
If you are running XP, and you do not want to mess up with the mbr or boot sectors,
(which was my case, and is the case of a lot of users of corporate computers)
then you can use my link to load the linux kernel and ramdisk from grub (grldr)
by adding a single text line in the boot.ini and copying a couple of files on the ntfs partition.
And the big iso file and data can obviously be stored (locally or) on the external usb hdd.
It is easy to add and remove (no special skills are required), and it is clean and safe.
My two cents,
Gilles

PS: VMPlayer (from vmware) is an other option to run knoppix within windows without risk.
I have setup a knoppix.sh loading a tgz file including all the vmware tools loaded at boot time from the same iso
in order to have the vmware extra features: transparent mouse, fast graphics, shared directories (workstation only), ...
It is way faster than Qemu and cygwin, and it just works great for me. As a side note, Knoppix in a vm
is actually the fastest Xserver for Windows I have found so far (including quite pricy ones...)

cf: http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtop...=107353#107353