I just want to +1 a couple things Loyal said and add my own thoughts below:
On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 10:41, loyal_barber <loyal_barber@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Which is somewhat sensible. Though I have repartitioned Windows computers often to
> add Linux, things can go wrong.
Indeed. That is always a possibility when one starts moving bits and
byes around a hard disk... it's no where NEAR as dangerous as it was
in the old days, but as Loyal says, your approach is certainly
sensible, especially given the constraints you mentioned (not
installing directly on roomies computer)
> Assuming your roommate's computer is pretty new (read: last 3-4 years) I see no
> problem with this way of doing things. I have done something similar myself. I run
> Mint on an 8 GB fast USB flash drive on a netbook. It works wonderfully. Do this
> when booting his computer: Watch the Power On Self Test (POST) during boot. That
> screen will usually list something that indicates a functiton key (usually F11 or
> F12) that will allow you to boot from a different device or with devices in a
> different order. Press the key the POST says to and look at the list displayed
> of boot devices. You should see something about "USB" in the list. If you do
> you can do exactly what you describe.
On addition to this... if you hit that F key that brings up the boot
menu, and you DON'T see something along the lines of "Boot from USB"
or similar, reboot and hit the F key for the BIOS. If Boot from USB
isn't enabled in BIOS, it won't show up in the boot device menu. So
if you don't see it there, check the bios to see if it exists at all
or is just disabled. I believe the default behaviour for pretty much
all systems these days is to enable USB booting, but never hurts to
take a look.
> Yes, you would be able to use it on whatever computer you finally get. However,
> when you have the choice, I would use the internal hard drive for my Linux setup
> because it will be inherently faster that way.
+1 here too... At the very least, I hope the USB ports and the drive
you're using (if you get the IOMega one, then it should be) are USB
2... trying to run an OS off a USB 1.1 device is a nightmare...
> Also, it sounds as if you are thinking of doing this on the sly. I would not
> recommend doing that as it may well infuriate your roommate. Never assume they
> won't find out. Even though you would not be touching his computer in any way
> it still may make your roommate angry. Tell him/her your plan and let them
> know that it will absolutely NOT touch anything on his computer but run totally
> from the external drive.
Also, +1. And let me add that you NEED TO BE EXTRA CAREFUL WITH DISKS
IF YOU DO THIS!!!! Most distros will automatically mount everything
they find during install. This means that there's a chance your
roomie's windows partition(s) will be found and set to automatically
mount. So you need to be extra careful that you don't inadvertently
delete stuff on the roomie's hard disk.
> All of that said, you will need to do one other thing to make this work. During
> Installation, absolutely do NOT install the GRUB boot manager on his hard drive.
> I may need some help from the other folks on the list here. I remember installing
> Linux some years ago on a second internal drive. I went into the computer's BIOS
> before performing an install and told the computer through the BIOS that the
> first hard drive did not exist by choosing "None" for that hard drive. I then did
> my install and waited until boot time to choose which drive to boot from. Why?
> Because when he/she turns on his/her computer and the pretty GRUB screen displays,
> I bet there is a serious fit on the way.
Absolutely right... Personally, I prefer to just pull the cable off
the drive, or remove it completely (if it's in a laptop/netbook)
because while there is almost 0 chance of screwing up, it's that last
.001% that will bite you in the ass.
If the primary onboard drive is still present when you install to the
USB drive, the installer will generally default to writing Grub (the
boot loader) to the MBR of the primary disk, NOT your USB disk. So
you must use caution here too.
Also, removing the primary disk will also eliminate what I mentioned
above about the windows partitions being auto-mounted by default.
The only other problem I could think of off the top of my head is
maybe a problem with the boot loader finding partitions if UUID or
device name changes between systems. If you're booting directly from
the USB drive, I don't imagine that you'll have much of an issue with
device names, but I'm not sure if the UUID would change or not.
Probably not, but I've never experimented with it to find out for
sure.
Cheers,
Jeff
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