installing ubuntu on an external hd?

Is it possible to install ubuntu on my external hard drive? I just got interested in trying it out but dont have the room to partition my hard drive. I am also waiting on a new t61 so i dont really want to install it on my old computer.

also, does anyone have a god tutorial to install ubuntu on to a dvd?

 

well if its detected and mounted when you start ubuntu it should be possible yes

 

Long story short: I have a dying Dell on which the internal HDD died about a month ago. While waiting for my new laptop, I've bought a new HDD which I use externally because it is SATA and the Dell does not support that interface. I'm using the SATA HDD through a SATA to USB interface. My BIOS can boot through USB so I've installed Ubuntu on the external HDD and boot from there. Everything works fine. To make sure this is clear: the only HDD in this machine is external.

I don't know why you would want to install Ubuntu onto a dvd.

 

Install it to a DVD? There's this thing called a "LiveCD". Download that, burn it to a disc, and boot from that. That's as close to "installing" it to a DVD as you'll get.

 

im sorry i didnt mean dvd i meant external hd. sorry for the confusion. Sound like its pretty easy.

thanks

 

Yup I've done it. You have to make sure you can however disable the internal HDD in the BIOS though. My Asus says its disabled but doesnt properly dissable it so i had some issues.

What happened is that I by mistake installed GRUB (boot loader) onto my internal HDD, i got mixed up as i though the internal one was dissabled. Problem was that i had to have the external HDD connected even if i wanted to boot into windows. For some reason GRUB would simply crash if the external HDD was not detected. After deleting grub <- bad idea and running fixboot and fixmbr to fix my windows loader, i stuffed up my internal recovery partition and also deleted my Partition table.... so lost everything on c:\WINDOWS

===

I've also managed to get ubuntu 6.10 installed onto the same external HDD and after much reading and tweaking got it to work on any computer that supports booting off USB. This was great after i modified it so the system would always query the GPU and load the appropriate drivers as the liveDVD does. Unfortunatly after one of the automatic updates it did, it must have wiped my settings as it wouldnt boot on any PC after the update.

Short answer is YES is can be done, but be repaired for some learning... it took me about 15 failed installations to get it working in the end.


I've given in and just partitioned 7GB for Ubuntu on my internal HDD and happy now,

Good luck

 

any flavor of Linux should run fine from an external drive.

You may need to add rootdelay=10 to your kernel boot options. The reason is that USB and firewire drives take a few seconds to register with the SCSI subsystem, and sometimes init will start and try to mount the drive before it's been assigned a /dev device.

If your external drive enclosure has a firewire interface, you'll be much better off using that instead. USB is slooooow.

 

yeh how come firewire is not dominent over usb if its so much faster. ive always wondered that.

 

You mean in market share? It is. In the professional world. It's the industry standard for audio / video editing equipment. Most hardware mixers and AV devices are available in Firewire only. No USB support whatsoever. Part of the reason is that Firewire is isochronous, whereas USB is not. That's quite critical for audio video editing, realtime applications, or anywhere that guaranteed performance is required.

For external hard drives, Firewire is sooo much faster than USB, you'd be a fool not to choose it, given the choice.

In cheapo consumer equipment, USB has become more popular because it's more flexible in terms of the types of devices you can attach. USB keyboards, mice, joysticks, coffee cup warmers, personal pleasure devices, cell phone interfaces, you name it.

FireWire is designed primarily for bulk data transfer (in fact, it's really just an extension of the SCSI protocol), so it's ideal for hard drives, scanners, and audio/video stuff. That's why an external hard drive on 400 Mb/s firewire is much faster than that same drive on a 480 Mb/s USB2 connection. Yes, the USB2 has a higher theoretical throughput, but the USB protocol wasn't designed for bulk data transfer and is quite inefficient at it, so ends up being much slower in real world usage.

 

USB also has a much lower licensing cost to manufacturers as compared to Firewire, so it's more attractive. And now that there are more USB devices than Firewire devices, the attractiveness is even more. It's really only the audio/video world that uses Firewire, and to a lesser extent people who need absolute maximum performance from external drives for some reason.

 

Not just folks who need maximum performance, but folks who need isochronous transfers. Audio/Video editing is probably the main consumer.

Here's the spec sheet for my external disk:
http://www.american-media.com/DS-2320BK.pdf

My point is only that from a consumer standpoint, if your laptop has both types of ports (USB and Firewire), and your external disk has both types of ports, you'd be foolish to choose the slower of the two. As you can see by the numbers in that PDF, you gain a nearly 25% performance increase simply by connecting the firewire cable instead of the USB cable.

Not to mention the fact that FireWire 800 doubles your speed, matching the native performance of the external disk itself, and there is no USB solution that even comes close.