External Hard Drive Boot Problem

[Newb20101]

Hello, just recently download Linux Mint 9 64-bit live dvd, burnt it onto a disk, loaded disk, everything was fine, installed it on my external hard drive, restarted, took disk out, but it won't boot from external Am I doing something wrong? I've searched the web and stuff but just end up getting even more confused and annoyed. The reason I'm installing it on an external is because i want to keep windows and linux separate. The external I'm using is the Iomega Prestige Desktop Hard Drive 1TB. I partitioned it 500GB for storage, 475GB Linux Mint 9 (ext4) and the rest for swap. are the sizes too big? any help would be appreciated.

Many thanks

[magump]

I do not claim to be an expert but perhaps part of your problem may be that when you first boot the computer, your boot sequence is looking to boot from your HD instead of looking for boot on your external drive. When booting up, go into setup and have your first boot option for the external drive, although it also seems as though Grub should list each OS to boot.

[remoulder]

Where did you install grub, it should have been to the external drive boot sector, probably /sdb if you only have 1 internal drive? Also I assume your BIOS is actually setup to boot from the external (USB?) drive first? As for the partitions, 475GB is far too much for the system, you only really need about 15-20GB if you put your /home on a separate partition. Swap shouldn't need to be more than about 2x the amount of RAM.

[oobetimer]

External hard drive is a bit more complicated, because there is a slow USB-channel. I have done these external-HD-installations following way:

1. 0,5 GB /boot -partition ext3 or/and 10 GB for / root partition ext3
2. 1-2 GB swap partition
3. 50-200 GB /home -partition ext3
4. rest for ntfs-partition for a all-user-use

http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/Lar ... WTO-4.html

[expat]

Like Remoulder said the 2 most important things are 1) enter your computers BIOS and go to boot tab set the hard drive order to boot from your external first.
2) the above will only work if you know where you installed grub.

So if you can tell us where you installed grub and what brand of computer you are using we can walk you through the rest. Different computers use different buttons to enter the BIOS,
mine for example is an ASUS and i use the delete button to enter my BIOS others use f2 f3 and so on.



Very sorry this is not meant to be a new post it is meant to be a reply to this posting http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=59064

Still waking up and hit the wrong button.

[Oscar799]

post relocated as requested by expat