I purchased a Western Digital external 1TB Passport HD for my Toshiba Windows 7 laptop, with the intention of installing, on the external HD, SUSE 12.2 in a multi-boot setup with W7.
At first, I thought the limitation to Windows and Mac applied only to the software, backup and such, it comes with and I don’t care about that, but I find that kind of WD drive is completely incompatible with Linux, which I think is scandalous and stupid. I will return the drive for a refund.
Can you recommend another kind of drive, preferably modestly priced, which is compatible with Linux?
Are you sure it doesn’t work? I don’t recall having problems with external drives for a very long time now. I format them as NTFS usually for storage, since Linux digests them fine and windows can read them w/o issues as well. Only problems I saw were with encrypted drives. If you use BitLocker on Windows, drive will be unusable for Linux (if someone knows a way to read this on Linux, please let me know :P). I had better luck with hardware encrypted external drives (like Aegis Padlock series) when encryption is needed. Since you are looking to install Linux on it, you’ll have to format the drive with something more Linux friendly (ext4 or btrfs). I doubt live CD can’t see it and even mount it.
If you expect to boot from the external drive, I would assume you have to configure options in your BIOS to boot first from the external (I assume) USB drive. Not sure if 12.2 is using UUID during boot process, but in your setup it may be very useful. OpenSUSE 12.3 does use UUID, but 12.1 didn’t and I had problems to make it boot from it.
As you do not give any details about which you base your conclusion that: “that kind of WD drive is completely incompatible with Linux,” it s a bit difficult to have any comment about this.
In general it is possible to install openSUSE on another disk then the one that is already in the system. Regradless if you call it “external” or not (the system can not “see” if a piece of hardware is inside the metal/plastoc box or not).
That the disk at the moment contains one big NTFS partition is of no concern. The installer will create the needed partitions (under your guidance, else it will try to use the “promary” disk) and create Linux file systems on them.
But again, as you give no details on your installation trial or where you got stuck, it is difficult to give any directions.
On 2013-03-23 18:36, hcvv wrote:
> As you do not give any details about which you base your conclusion
> that: “that kind of WD drive is completely incompatible with Linux,” it
> s a bit difficult to have any comment about this.
There was a long thread, not long ago, of someone trying to install
Linux on an external hard disk, I don’t remember the make. Many things
were tried. In the end, the chap contacted the manufacturer support, and
they said that booting from that external hard disk was not supported,
period.
I don’t buy external hard disk combos. I buy a box and a hard disk
separately. For hard disks I normally use Seagate, and the last
enclosures I bought were “Enermax”, Jazz model, and “Sharkoon”. Both
have eSATA and usb ports.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
Thank you. I phoned WD and they said, no. I had the impression that the fellow wasn’t very knowledgeable, perhaps. I will go ahead and try, no harm in that.
Yes, it’s a USB 2.0 connection.
I do no not intend to use any encryption protocol, so that is not an issue.
SUSE 12.2 uses the GRUB2 boot loader and, I believe that should present no problem either.
I understand that, after initial installation and before the second boot, for final configuration, I must change the BIOS boot priority sequence to DVD, external hard disk, internal HD, that will not be hard either…press PF12 when the Toshiba screen comes up and make the change, then continue the boot. From then on, the laptop will always boot to the external drive (if present) and offer the choice of SUSE or Windows.
Before any of this, I plan to shrink - using Windows - the external HD Windows NFTS partition (1TB!) to perhaps 200GB, more than enough, then see, on installation, what SUSE wants. I ran SUSE live for a bit and saw it had no trouble getting to my Windows file structure and reading those files.
Please, correct me if I am wrong about any of this.
Thank you. I called WD and the guy there told me I cannot install Linux on their external hard disk. Frankly, he didn’t sound too bright to me. That the system does not know where the disk physically resides makes sense to me…therefore, indeed, whether it’s a second disk inside a desktop or an exterior one outside a laptop should make no difference. I am actually going to attempt the installation…worst is it will not work but the existing internal HD will not be effected…that’s the whole point of this external disk, to keep things away from the Windows disk where otherwise there’s plenty of space left to accommodate a Linux installation.
Thank you again,
pe1800
BTW, Henk van Velden, you Dutch? I am, lived in Canada for 45 years.
Thank you. That would mean then that, whenever I want to boot into Windows I would have to disconnect the external drive, not so terrible.
But does not SUSE install the GRUB2 boot loader and the Master Boot Record on the external disk?
Not by default:
When I said, does not SUSE put GRUB and MBR on the external disk, I meant of course when I direct SUSE to install itself on the external hard disk.
On 2013-03-24 01:46, pe1800 wrote:
>
>> Not by default:
> When I said, does not SUSE put GRUB and MBR on the external disk, I
> meant of course when I direct SUSE to install itself on the external
> hard disk.
You have to be quite insistent
You would not be the first one that ends with grub with the first disk.
Telling yast to install on the second disk is not enough.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
My location is atop every of my posts in the Location field. And yes, my location and my name fit into my Netherlands nationality. By birth I am also Dutch (which is of course only a regional expression, but has no legal value), but I now live in Gelderland.
You fear of putting openSUSE on your “primary” disk is a bit useless. Most people that use a multi-boot between Windows and Linux only use one disk.
That said, some use different disks and there are threads here about the problems that come with such a contrsuct. IIRC the main issue is that often one wants to remove such a disk when not needed. And when tthen on the other disk there is the boot information, the system may refuseto boot because from the available disk because the other one is missing. One solution (as mentioned by others) is not to make it a real multi boot situation, but to reconfigure the boot sequence in the BIOS every time you wantt to change. In this case do not use the primary disk for anything at installation.
I must add that all I said is on the assumtion that that particular disk is just a disk. When I see people post that there may be disks where one can not boot from, I am out (why does one take the trouble to create such sort of disk). But I can understand that some BIOS does not allow boot from USB connected devices.
Many modern HDDs are using 4K sector size internally. Some of them emulate 512 bytes sectors externally, so they look like traditional disks. Some of them do not - this is called “native 4K sectors”. Those disk behave very differently and usually are not bootable using normal BIOS. Advanced Format - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thus, I guess that a standard question to anyone coming here with a problem like: I can not boot from (or install on) a disk I added to my system, must be: “Is it by any change a disk with native 4K sectors (please read the documentation that comes with the hardware)?”
On 2013-03-24 09:46, hcvv wrote:
> I must add that all I said is on the assumtion that that particular
> disk is just a disk. When I see people post that there may be disks
> where one can not boot from, I am out (why does one take the trouble to
> create such sort of disk). But I can understand that some BIOS does not
> allow boot from USB connected devices.
“The drive is working as per normal, We do not support these external
drives to work as boot drives. Please kindly use the drive as a normal
external drive, if you need a boot drive for your linux it would be best
to get a internal drive.”
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
My newest box has two disks. It came with one, and I added a second.
If I look at the disks with, say “parted”, it tells me that the physical sector size is 4096, and the logical sector size is 512.
Before I installed that second disk, I temporarily put it in a disk enclosure, and looked at it from another computer. And the program I used (I think it was “gdisk”) warned me that the disk had 4K sectors.
I am suspecting that “native 4K sectors” might be native to the control logic (outside the disk electronics) rather than native to the disk itself.
