surfzombie wrote:Hi Everyone,
I have an external hard drive 250gig and would like to install any version of Ultimate Edition on it and have it run independent without installing grub or any boot loader on my computer. Can It be done and if so please tell me how? I would like to share this OS with others and so them how cool it is.
Its totally possible to do - no problem. However, sharing it with your other buddies, might be a problem. When you install Ultimate Edition to a disk it configures itself to the current hardware on your system. Unless you and your buddies all have identical systems, It will not work correctly, if at all. Best option would to just burn the DVD and run live sessions to show your friends
To install to a external hard drive, all you need to do is to verify that your BIOS supports booting from USB (or eSATA if that is the type). To do this you would need to press and hold the del key down during the BIOS post screen (when you first start your system), if you do not see text during boot normally (say if you have a compac or HP, ect.) you need to be quick with your eyes and read the text at the bottom of the splash screen (possibly F10 or similar) and then hold down the appropriate key to enter BIOS setup. Go through all your tabs (not really tabs but panels or something similar) and find boot options and enter it and verify that you can boot from USB or eSATA, ect. If you can boot from your external hard-drive, you might want to do a fresh install on a clean disk or partition, so exit BIOS without saving (this will reboot your machine and if your quick about it you might be able to slip the DVD into your drive and have it boot to live session right away).
1. Turn off your computer and insert the live DVD or CD if you have it, start live session.
2. Once into GNOME desktop goto SYSTEM>>ADMINISTRATION>>Gnome Partition Editor
3. Right click on your external hard drive and select "New" if you want to create a new partition to install to or click "Format to" to erase all data on disk and start with a fresh disk.
Note: you might need to "unmount" the disk if it mounted automatically before you can do anything with it. For a breakdown of different formats and what they do see TheeMahns
How-To. Relevant info on formats is located about 3/4 of the way down this "tweaking guide".
4. Once you have a new partition made or fresh formated drive, exit Gnome Partition Editor & check out my
How-To for creating a separate /home partition and /media partition if you would like. I recommend this, and it will walk you through the install.
5. During the install process, it will ask you if you would like to install bootloader and to what drive, this is where your install is unique in that you don't want to install GRUB on your main drive, so just un-tick "install bootloader" and click continue. Your now on your way to installing to your external hard drive
If you run into any more problems or questions during install, just cancel out and return here, I'll try to answer your questions.
