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View Full Version : [ubuntu] 11.04 on External Hard Drive



cbennett926
May 7th, 2011, 04:56 AM
Hello, I was wondering if it were possible to run and boot Ubuntu off of an external hard drive, I have a Seagate Free Agent 1.5 Terabyte external hard drive, I formatted it to FAT32 but am willing to reformat if necessary. I just really want to be able to have Ubuntu to run off of an external hard drive.

Quackers
May 7th, 2011, 05:33 AM
Yes you can do that. You really only need to make a partition formatted in ext4 for the root partition (mount point " / " ) and maybe a swap partition too. The rest of the disc can be any type of partition or unallocated space (as long as you don't exceed the maximum of 4 primary partitions).
During installation you need to make sure that grub is installed to the mbr of the USB drive, NOT the internal hard drive. You can find out which is which if you boot from the live cd/usb and select "try ubuntu" and when the desktop loads you can go to System > Admin > gparted where your hard drives and their partitions will be listed. On a normal system the internal drive will be /dev/sda and the external drive will be /dev/sdb, but it's safer to check that first.
Grub should be installed to the hard drive, NOT to a partition (like /dev/sdb5 for instance).

cbennett926
May 7th, 2011, 05:38 AM
Ok, thank you so much!

Now I am fairly familiar with all of this, but I am currently using Wubi on a Windows Vista, so by any chance could you give me a step by step or some form of easy instructions?

Quackers
May 7th, 2011, 05:44 AM
Sadly I am not at all familiar with wubi installs. I have seen problems when a wubi install is on the same system as a dual boot as well. Maybe somebody else could give you better guidance as to whether the wubi install should be removed first.
Which version of Ubuntu will you be installing? The different versions can have slight differences during installation.

cbennett926
May 7th, 2011, 05:46 AM
Oh I just stating that I am using Wubi haha, I want to install 11.04 to an external hard drive and just boot it up on my PC. My PC does allow usb booting from the BIOS so that is not a problem. I am just having problems getting the external hard drive to cooperate.

Quackers
May 7th, 2011, 05:50 AM
What problems are you having with the external drive?

cbennett926
May 7th, 2011, 05:55 AM
I had unplugged all internal hard drives and used a live cd to install Ubuntu onto the same hard drive, and all went well, or so I thought, and it said that the Grub could not be found or something along those lines. I really cant remember.

Quackers
May 7th, 2011, 05:59 AM
Ok, with the just the external drive connected please boot from the live cd and after connecting to the internet go to the site below and download the boot script to your DESKTOP and then open up a terminal (Applications > Accessories > terminal) and run


sudo bash ~/Desktop/boot_info_script*.sh

This will produce a results.txt file on your desktop. Please copy the contents of that file and paste them in your next post between CODE tags. For CODE tags click on New Reply (not quick reply)and then click on the # symbol in the toolbar.
This will give a full overview of your current system.
Thanks.

http://bootinfoscript.sourceforge.net/

This version of the boot script does not give full details with 11.04 but hopefully it will be enough for your purposes.