How to install to USB hdd?

[Werner P. Schulz]

Did you read Poor man's install?

[otropogo]

Did you read Poor man's install?

I have now, thanks, and the other two links as well. But I can't say I'm any wiser. In fact, I don't understand the instructions.

For instance, it's not clear whether a poor man's install to a USB hard drive can be done just to a previously existing partition or not.

And for another, it's not clear what I have to do to make it bootable. Right now I have a bootable Knoppix USB drive, but it's crippled because synaptic doesn't work. I have no idea why. Can I simply copy the Knoppix files over from the LiveDVD to fix things?

Another unknown - at one point the wiki says that I can install a bootable Knoppix to an external hard drive partition simply by doing it from within the partition. How does that work? Do I have to try it blind and wait to see if it wipes my main hard drive or the entire external hard disk , or will the installer actually confirm that the installation will be made to, say, sdc2?

The part about an installation to an external hard drive making for a faster running system doesn't make much sense to me either, unless you can boot from a Firewire800 or eSata port (can you?). If the drive has only a USB2.0 connection, it won't make any difference to speed compared to a Jumpdrive or flash card (unless those are extremely slow), because the USB2.0 port itself will be the bottleneck.

If I have to use GRUB or some other boot manager to boot Knoppix from the external hard drive, I won't feel safe keeping any data on the drive, which would be a spectacular waste, as I don't have time to be backing up all the time.