August 19th, 2006, 11:38 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: colorado
Posts: 22
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better than my idea but here goes
My idea would have been to have a bare no frills command line only install of the / filesystem on the internal HD, boot that and mount the full goodies, all written on the external, then chroot to that.
A neat little side option to that would be to have the NT swapfile on the USB drive and the Linux swap partition on the internal HD, maybe run NT programs, including the swap file, in WInE? It sounds just crazy enough to be worth trying.
Quote: | Originally Posted by punkrawkpat Let me start by saying that not only is it possible to install and run linux from an external USB drive, I am doing it right now. To date I have successfully installed Suse, Fedora and Ubuntu on an external drive, as well as having Frugalware and PCLinuxOS on my internal HDD, all available through boot options in GRUB.
You would be right in assuming that if your BIOS has USB boot support, there shouldnt be a problem at all. The thing with Linux is that most distributions don't have USB support loaded into the kernel during the boot phase, so you will generally come across such errors as the root drive not being found, etc etc etc.
You can easily overcome this by creating an INITRD Ramdisk that will force the kernel to preload USB support during boot.
In the case of suse, you do this by:
1. Install Suse to the USB device (/sda, or sdb etc) - make sure you select to have the grub bootloader installed on the USB drive too, and not the Master drive.
2. Boot from the CD into Rescue mode
3. Issue the following commands:
'mkdir /mnt/sysimage'
'mount /dev/sdaX /mnt/sysimage'
'chroot /mnt/sysimage'
NOTE: sdaX refers to the partition u installed Suse on and the mapping of the USB drive (could be /sdb or similar too).
4. Use VI to edit the following file - /etc/sysconfig/kernel'
5. Add the following into the quotes at the line that has: INITRD_MODULES=" "
ehci-hcd
ohci-hcd
uhci-hcd
sd_mod
usb-storage
THIS LINE SHOULD NOW LOOK LIKE THIS:
INITRD_MODULES="reiserfs ehci-hcd ohci-hcd uhci-hcd usb-storage sd_mod"
6. Issue the following commands:
'mount -tproc none /proc'
'mkinitrd'
7. Add the kernel and initrd image to the boot grub loader on the master boot record (NOTE: for the initrd line, just add initrd (hd1,6)/boot/initrd - where hd1,6 is relevant to your partition setup)
A typical default Suse 9.2 install grub line for this setup would look like below (be sure to substitute according to your configuration):
title Suse 9.2 (USB)
kernel (hd1,1)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8-24-smp ro root=/dev/sda2
initrd (hd1,1)/boot/initrd
8. REBOOT!!!
The steps for other distros are a bit different, but the purpose of the exercise is the same. If u need help with another distro, I can provide individual steps for that too. |
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