Can OpenSuse (either Tumbleweed or Leap) be installed and run from an external hard drive? I don’t mean a “live” install. I’m talking complete install as you would on your internal hard drive. If yes, would it make any difference if it were connected via USB C (Thunderbolt) vs USB 3?
Yes, I have it as such but I think you are asking on the wrong forum, you should write in “Install/Boot…”, an admin will redirect you.
Typically this is the procedure:
- Check EFI/MBR
- Initialize and format EFI/MBR for the external HDD/SSD
- Download and set up a live USB stick
- For safety remove all of your internal HDD/SSD
- Plug in your external SSD/USB
- Boot using the live stick and install:
- If EFI, make sure /boot/efi is installed within the external SSD/HDD
- If MBR, make sure boot record is written into the external SSD/HDD
After installation, reboot, remove the live media then reboot, then install your internal storage devices again, and you’ll have a USB linux on the go.
As for USB 3 vs thunderbolt, thunderbolt will be faster, but if it’s HDD, your HDD will be the slowest part and won’t make a difference.
Yes, it can. I have one of those. Okay, it uses USB2, because I had an older external drive that I replaced with larger drives for backups. So I found a new use for it. And you can do that with Tumbleweed or with Leap (I have one of each).
When I install to an external drive, I use MBR booting. And then, after install, I add EFI support with
shim-install --removable --no-nvram
I want to be able to use the external drive to boot any system (for possible repairs), so it is useful if it can boot either with MBR or with EFI.
As already mentioned in the other posts: Yes, you can do this with openSUSE Tumbleweed as well as with openSUSE Leap.
You can do this by installation or by just copying your existing system to an external drive. In both cases you need to keep in mind that the system you installed/copied to the external device reflects your current hardware setup and will probably not/not properly run with different hardware if you do not extend/modify it manually.
Here a few trouble areas i ran into in the past.:
- If your current hardware is setup for UEFI-booting then your system will not be setup for MBR-booting.
- If your current hardware has only intel CPU graphics then there will be no drivers for other graphic cards like NVIDIA-cards installed.
- If you copied your currently installed system from your hard drive to an USB device your initrd will probably not contain the modules necessary to drive the external drive (e.g. usb-storage for USB-drives).
There might be more areas to watch out for. In general graphics can be problematic (watch out for NVIDIA optimus setups).
Regards
susejunky
Speed makes a difference. You may want to use an adapter USB 3.1 Gen 2 > M.2 NVME such as: Plugable USB 3.1 Gen 2 Tool-free NVMe Enclosure – Plugable Technologies or similar.
Thanks for your answers. Sorry If I posted in the wrong place. My question was about installing, but I was thinking about the hardware side of it.
With some difficulties (I won’t get into it now) I got Tumbleweed Kde installed on my external HD. It boots up to the log in screen, but I made a mistake somewhere and I can’t log in. Because this is a personal computer and I am the only user, I skipped (clicked on “skip”) the user login information, but I did put in a password for Admin. I thought I would be able to get in without a name and password by just clicking “enter” and use only the admin password when needed. Perhaps I was mistaken. Anyway, is there a way to fix this or do I have to reinstall?
I’m not sure what you did.
If you set a root password (probably the administrative password), then you should be able to login to a terminal (command line) as root. You can get to a command line with CTRL-ALT-F1
Once you are logged in as root, you can set the password for any existing user with:
passwd username
If you failed to create a user, you can do that with the “useradd” command at the command line. And
man useradd
should give you information on using that command. After the “useradd”, then set the password as described above.
nrickert already explained how to create a new user from the command line using useradd.
Here just two more hints:
- Be careful to supply the –create-home
switch to useradd otherwise no home directory will be created for the new user and it will not be able to log in. - If you want the new user to login automatically and you are using KDE as DE just do systemsettings5
→ (Personalization) Account Details select the user and check the box Log in automatically.
Regards
susejunky
Presumably you skipped https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/startup/html/book-opensuse-startup/art-opensuse-installquick.html#sec-opensuse-installquick-user
Open a virtual console (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and run ‘yast users’.
I thought I posted this yesterday. I must have neglected to click “submit”. Anyway, I’m embarrassed to say that when trying to login with my admin password I entered “admin” rather than “root” for user name. Once I did it correctly, I was able to login and then add a user name and password. It is all working correctly now. I appreciate all of the helpful comments.
I’m glad it is working. And yes, we all make our share of dumb mistakes.