[Tfug] Booting External Harddrive

[Jude Nelson]

It is very possible, as this is how I used Linux for long time before I had
courage enough to erase Windoze.  You will need an initrd or an initramfs,
however, so you can load the SCSI and USB drivers which allow you to mount a
USB volume as root.  The easiest way to do this is simply to do a fresh
install on your portable hardrive from a host computer.  Debian and Ubuntu
can do this from their installation CDs, I think--just make sure to select
the appropriate drive!

Jude Nelson

On 10/28/06, chaz tompkins <chaz12ster at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> your mileage may vary but if your hypothetical parents have an older
> computer it may not be happy booting from usb.  i have lost much
> hair trying to do the same.
>
> best of luck
>
> On 10/27/06, Claude Rubinson <rubinson at u.arizona.edu> wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 27, 2006 at 02:01:03PM -0400, Charles R. Kiss wrote:
> > > Say one is leaving town for Thanksgiving, and one doesn't want to take
> > > one's laptop.
> > >
> > > Is it possible, instead to take ones external harddrive (200GB) that
> > > contains boot, swap, and operating system partitions?  Like a portable
> > > operating system disk with personal data one can take on the road, say
> > > to your parents house during the Thanksgiving holiday, plug the USB
> into
> > > back, change the BIOS settings to boot the external harddrive, into
> the
> > > installation menu, etc.
> >
> > Why not just take the portable drive and a live cd?
> >
> > Claude
> >
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