Booting F8 from USB Attached Hard Drive

Antonio antonio.montagnani at gmail.com
Sun Nov 25 07:45:37 UTC 2007


2007/11/25, Mikkel L. Ellertson <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com>:
> Rick Bilonick wrote:
> > Is it possible to install Fedora 8 on a hard drive (120 gb) attached to
> > a laptop via USB, and then boot from it without damaging the distro
> > installed on the laptop's internal hard drive? The laptop is about 2
> > years old (Dell Inspiron 2200) that I believe can boot from an external
> > hard drive or a USB flash drive.
> >
> > I would like to test out F8 with the laptop's wireless card and I'm
> > debating whether to use a USB hard drive that I have or buying an 8 gb
> > USB flash drive. (If someone could point me to how to set up a usb flash
> > drive to boot F8, I would appreciate it.)
> >
> > Rick B.
> >
> As long as your BIOS will boot from a USB drive, it is not a
> problem. I would suggest you try the live CD to see if F8 is going
> to work for you before doing a USB install.
>
> I have not tested it with F8, but F7 installed just fine to a USB
> hard drive using the expert install. You have to tweak the Grub
> configuration after the install because the BIOS mapping of the USB
> drive changes between the install and when you you boot from the
> drive. If you are using LVM, you also have to make sure you are
> using different volume groups on each drive. If you are using
> labels, you have to make sure the labels on the USB drive are
> different then the ones on the built-in drives. If you are using are
> not using LVM or labels, you have to change the /etc/fstab entries
> to use /dev/sda for the USB drive. At least when I did it, the
> initrd only had the USB drivers, so the USB drive was the first SCSI
> drive, while during install, the internal drive was /dev/sda.
>
> Mikkel
> --
>
>   Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
> for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!
>
>
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>

It works also on F8 (and testing also F9!!!) : if your laptop is
running Windows, and you make a fresh install you don' t have to care
about LVM: and if you install Grub (that I suggest) on the USB disk
you don't touch the laptop in any respect, so if you attach USB you
start Fedora, otherwise Microsoft.
The only drawback is that you can't attach USB disk to another PC
unless you have not taken care of different label....
-- 
Antonio Montagnani
Skype : antoniomontag




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