# Help with installing Linux on External Hard Drive



## AhrenBa (Jul 21, 2005)

Hello,
I have a Western Digital 160GB external hard drive. I would like to install Linux (most likely Ubuntu) on it and be able to boot from it when I restart my computer. I am running Windows right now.

What things do I need to do to install and boot Linux from my external Hard Drive? Thanks


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## saikee (Jun 11, 2004)

(1) Have the motherboard BIOS capable of selecting an external USB/firewire device to boot first - This can be a show stopper if your motherboard can't deliver!

(2) Choose the distro wisely as not many of them are put together for booting off an external hard disk. Don't think standard Ubuntu can do it so try Puppy as it has a slower boot loader suitable for booting from a USB device.


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## AhrenBa (Jul 21, 2005)

saikee said:


> (1) Have the motherboard BIOS capable of selecting an external USB/firewire device to boot first - This can be a show stopper if your motherboard can't deliver!
> 
> (2) Choose the distro wisely as not many of them are put together for booting off an external hard disk. Don't think standard Ubuntu can do it so try Puppy as it has a slower boot loader suitable for booting from a USB device.


Ok, cool, thank you. Do I need to do anything with partitioning or will the Linux installer do that for me? This willl erase all the data on the drive, correct? Thanks.

Besides Puppy, are there some other good distros for external USB hard drive? Or, is there a site with linux distro info?


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## saikee (Jun 11, 2004)

A Linux only needs a partition to reside in. If you give the whole disk to the installer it will use the whole disk and format it.

Best way is to use a Live CD to create a partition, say 10Gb for Linux and 1Gb for swap. However Puppy is very small and doesn't use swap partition so about 2Gb for a single partition should be ample.

Generally extra work is needed to boot a Linux from an external hard disk due to the slow response of the USB/Firewire port. You can install any of the distros but the standard boot loader Grub and Lilo are too fast for such application.

Suggest to do a search on this topic.


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