Linux on an External Hard Drive

[Archeye]

Hey all, I was having some issues and was wondering if anyone here would be able to help me out or give me a few pointers. So I went out and bought myself a Western Digital 750g external hard drive not too long ago with the intent of installing ubuntu on the drive. However, I've seem to have had no luck in doing this

I understand that any large drives are unable to me formatted to Fat32 which is what is needed I believe in order for the drive to be bootable for a seperate OS, however the drive is NTFS. I have tried to partition it into different smaller segments and formatting those sections to Fat32, which worked, however I can choose that section of the 750g Hard Drive when I go to install Ubuntu.

Anyway, I end up just letting Ubuntu use the entire external drive to install the OS and it goes all the way through the OS and gets to the "Your computer must be restarted" phase. However, after completing the installation and booting up the computer, it says that no OS was found.

Please help?

[vesseblah]

External USB drives might not be bootable at all, or you might need to enable the feature from BIOS somewhere. It depends on motherboard if it can be done.

[ispano]

It's possible to put Linux on a USB drive, but it's usually a live distro. If you're looking for something to install and use on a fairly regular basis, an extra internal drive is your best bet.

[lockblock]

i agree you can't install it to external other then a live distro however the statement about dual booting requiring fat32 makes no sense

[svenmk]

I have Ubunutu 10.04 LTS installed on a 4GB USB stick (not live distro but actual install) that fits on any computer that supports boot from USB. I find it very handy for checking broken computers and/or transferring files when windows is not able to boot. As for installing Ubuntu, it can be installed on Fat32, NTFS or native Ext2/3. Just make sure in BIOS your computer is capable and is set to boot from USB first.

[ispano]

Yeah the issue that arises when putting an OS on a USB drive of any kind is that the BIOS controls the bootup til the OS starts its USB drivers. When it does this, the USB system is effectively restarted, basically causing the boot to fail. Live Distros got around it by loading stuff into RAM right at the beginning, then it can do the change with no issues. So if the normal install can do the same, it should work.