Booting off USB drive

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 03:28:21PM -0400, Samuel Donham wrote:
> Has anyone tried booting a whole distro off an external USB hard drive?

Yes.  And it kind of worked.

I was trying out Ubuntu Linux for the first time and tried installing
it on my new USB hard drive.  My internal hardrive was Gentoo and
booting with grub.  I think I did some messing with the grub.conf
after Ubuntu did its editing, but I forget those details.

ANyway, the intenal grub could choose either the internal distribution
or the USB harddrive distribution--my BIOS doesn't know how to boot
off an external USB harddrive, as far as I know.  The only other catch
was that the Ubuntu installation booted the kernel just fine, but
panicked when it needed to find init, but I consider that a
distribution issue.  I since copied a different partition off my
internal drive to the external and put Ubuntu on the freed up internal
partition, and I can boot either internal installations.

I bet the external boot issue was straight forward (given some Linux
debugging).

I wish there was a better USB boot standard.  Maybe we need a device
that can emulate both a USB floppy (for early boot) and a mass storage
device (for the real boot).

-kb