Booting off external USB drive

I have found a couple of articles that detail how to boot from an external USB drive. Just to be clear, I am not trying to INSTALL Ubuntu off of an external like you would off a DVD or TRY it. I am talking about running it from an external. So it acts like the Linux partition, except it does not reside on your drive - it resides on an external.

Has anyone successfully done this? And if so, how do you guys like it? Does it work the same way?

 

I'm no expert but there are a couple ways to go about this...

1. Install on a flash drive with "persistence". There a few programs that will do this, but imo linuxliveusb works great. Download the linux .iso you want and install to flash drive specifying the amount of persistence or drive space you want. a 4Gb flash drive works well.
Persistence lets you save data, files, music, etc.. just like a regular install, although i think there are some limitations on doing system updates?

2. use a regular external hard drive, partition how you want it, and install linux on it with boot loader, making sure you don't accidentally overwrite your primary hdd's windows boot loader. (know what your doing).
This method should do everything you want, and work just as a regular linux install.
For partitions i would recommend 3: /root, /home, and /swap (2x amount of ram).

 

Thanks man. I actually have found a few guides that instruct on how to go about it. I was wondering if someone had actually successfully DONE it and if so, what pitfalls they could feel as compared to having it installed on the primary/secondary internal.

 

It can be a bit of a headache with grub. You want to make sure you are using GUIDs instead of partition names, since with a USB device that will be variable. I think it does that automatically in the latest versions anyway.

You can't set GRUB to ignore a drive during its probe (without editing its scripts), so the easiest thing to do is to disable or unplug your other OS-containing drives from the system when you install, unless you don't mind having some entries you need to delete or ignore later.

 

You could always do what I do every day, and that is simply boot off a thumb drive into a live session. The only draw back (besides obvious things like limited space due to RAM) to that is you have to configure it how you like it every time you boot.
I use a thumb drive with a write-protect switch, and another flash drive for storage because for me it's the safest method for an internet machine.