Successfully installed on external usb drive

English Install/Boot/Login
1

This is a follow-up to an earlier question I asked on the thread of the possibility of installing openSUSE on my laptop’s external hdd connected to a usb port and managed by a 3rd party boot manager. I was told that it can be done and to try it and I did and it was successful.

I have a laptop with 1 hdd containing 3 existing OSes (msdos, and 2 winxps) managed by a 3rd party boot manager. To install I prepared the usb drive by creating 2 linux partitions (linux native [ext3] and linux swap drive). There was another ntfs partition on it.

The install went without a hitch but I had to make sure about three important points:

  1. deselect “Automatic Configuration”

  2. disk partitioning portion of the install - I had to edit the proposed configuration and had to make sure that linux will only be installed on the usb drive. I ended up with 3 partitions - root, home and swap.

  3. make sure that the linux boot loader (grub) is installed on the linux root partition and not on the mbr of the first drive where my 3rd party boot manager resides.

On reboot, I edited my 3rd party boot manager and added the linux root partition where grub resides.:slight_smile:

Now I’m down to fixing my old time woes with linux on my laptop – no audio, video and while this time my wireless card was detected and installed it did not detect my DSL device [maybe because I am trying to connect to the Internet wirelessly].

Something to work on… :wink:

Cheers!

2

Further to this advice, I’ve found that if you modify the grub drive order settings in the installer such that the external drive you’re installing to is first, e.g.

/dev/sdc <-(this being the external drive you’re installing to)
/dev/sda
/dev/sdb

It normally boots happily. If it doesn’t, you can manually install grub from another Linux. I’ve used these instructions;

EeeUser Forum / openSUSE onto SDHC without CD drive -> STUCK!

(look for Pindar’s second post)

3

The installer did not detect my DSL device because I didn’t have any (DSL device or card) installed in my laptop. I thought this was needed for my internet connection via DSL.

I got my (wireless) internet connection by running the KNetworkManager and configuring my wireless card that was detected during the install. And this was after reading through the Startup Guide.

I always took for granted reading the Official Startup Guide. Very important for newbies. So I am taking time to read the linux documentation - painful but crucial to learning linux.