I would like some information on loading suse11.
I have an older white box that has been running xp for years.
I have a Vantec ez-swap2 SATA hard drive case a w/WD 140G hard drive in it that runs xp now.
I have a duplicate removable unit to install suse11 on.
The last time I tried this was suse9.2 and it toasted the x-fi sound card.
I have 2 ide drives that I use for storage and I don’t want the installation to touch them.
Has anybody tried this? and are there any gotcha’s I should know about?
I don’t want to disconnect the ide drives everytime I swap the hard drive and boot to suse.
Hi,
Installing in a removable device is not different that in internal drives.
There are some things to be aware about, specially if your BIOS doesn´t not support booting from them. This isn´t an issue anymore, since the latest BIOS support that feature.
You better check that in tech spec of your system.
Now, from the point of view of Open Suse, when you get to the partitioning step of the installation process, you only have to be careful to identify clearly the device name corresponding to the disk you want Open Suse to be installed on. Don´t accept the defaults given to you by Yast. Be also very careful with the partition where you install the grub bootloader: if you want your internal disk be untouched by grub, don´t install it on them. Select the MBR or the boot record of one of the partitions (boot, root) in the disk where Open Suse is to be installed.
Usually, IDE drives are identified as hdX , X in [a,b,…].
Scsi, Sata and usb drives are named like sda, sdb, etc.
The name is assigned in order of detection by the scsi and usb_storage subsystem, which is not deterministic by nature, so when in doubt, use the UUID corresponding to each device, which remains inmutable.
Regards.
This was the case in openSUSE up to openSUSE-10.2. As of openSUSE-10.3, libata was used with its modified naming convention, and now all drives are referred to as sda, sdb, sdc … etc … with individual partitions sda1, sda2, … sdb1, sdb2 … etc …
The openSUSE concepts guide touches on this.
Concepts - openSUSE
For user dwrench, note access to external hard drives is slower than internal drive access, and you will notice a significant performance hit on your openSUSE running on an external drive.