Installing to External USB Drive

[gavinjb]

Hi,

I have been playing around with the latest version of Mint through VirtualBox and have bene impressed, and I am now ready to install for real, but as my Laptop has no install disks for Windows I don't want to overwrite the OS or the boot sector of the machine, so what I am planning to do is connect a usb drive and install Mint on this and once everything is installed and configured I will swap the drive for the drive in the Laptop.

My question is, if I install on this drive do I need to do anything to make sure it writes the boot manager to this drive and not the internal disk, I have had a setup like this before (with Ubuntu), but I installed by swapping the disks and then swapping them back aftert the install.

Once it is installed I can change my bios settings so that if this is connected it will boot from this disk and not the internal disk.

Gavin,

[viking777]

As you progress through the installation look at the 'Advanced' buttons (where they occur). One of these contains an option to choose the destination for the grub installation - I just can't remember which one it is at present.

Needless to say, make sure you choose the right disk if you have more than one, or better still, only have one disk plugged in and then it is more difficult to make a mistake.

[gavinjb]

Thanks for the help, I think I will go for the option of idsconnecting my internal drive while I do the install to be safe.