| 1 |
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 4:49 PM, Michael Sullivan<msulli1355@×××××.com> wrote: |
| 2 |
> On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 16:38 -0500, Paul Hartman wrote: |
| 3 |
>> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 4:30 PM, Michael Sullivan<msulli1355@×××××.com> wrote: |
| 4 |
>> > My server box died last week, and, as it was about ten years old, I |
| 5 |
>> > decided to replace it. My wife and I opened the case and removed the |
| 6 |
>> > hard drive (A major undertaking for us, I might add). We hooked the old |
| 7 |
>> > hard drive up to a hard drive enclosure and plugged it via USB into a |
| 8 |
>> > new computer we bought this morning. This new computer runs Windows |
| 9 |
>> > Vista and only Windows Vista. I want to run Gentoo Linux on the |
| 10 |
>> > enclosure. I have to keep Windows on it because all the computer repair |
| 11 |
>> > shoppes around here only know Windows, and will be confused if I take it |
| 12 |
>> > in to be repaired and it isn't running Windows. I planned to install |
| 13 |
>> > grub on the main internal hard drive and use that to boot to the USB |
| 14 |
>> > drive. I checked the BIOS, and there's no option to boot to USB. I've |
| 15 |
>> > spent a couple of hours today googling this question, but all I can seem |
| 16 |
>> > to find is how to do this from a linux partition other than the one on |
| 17 |
>> > the USB drive. Is this even possible, and if so, how would I do it? |
| 18 |
>> |
| 19 |
>> It seems surprising that such a new computer wouldn't let you boot |
| 20 |
>> from USB. Usually in the boot order section of BIOS one of those |
| 21 |
>> choices will be "removable disk" or "external device" or something |
| 22 |
>> like that. That will typically boot your USB disk. |
| 23 |
>> |
| 24 |
> |
| 25 |
> Nope. The only things it has are floppy boot (It doesn't even have a |
| 26 |
> floppy drive!), cd boot, and hdd boot... |
| 27 |
|
| 28 |
I have also seen one computer where the external USB hard drive |
| 29 |
actually showed up in the "Hard drives" section along with the normal |
| 30 |
internal drives, in case you didn't look there already. |
| 31 |
|
| 32 |
Anyway, I am sure you can install GRUB to hard drive and have it boot |
| 33 |
from the USB disk without any problems -- as long as the USB disk can |
| 34 |
be seen by grub. I am not sure how the Vista boot loader and GRUB |
| 35 |
interact (or interfere) with each other. I think there is a way to |
| 36 |
calling grub from the Windows Vista boot loader so as to leave the |
| 37 |
Windows pieces of the boot process in-tact. I haven't done that myself |
| 38 |
so I can't give specific help, sorry. |
| 39 |
|
| 40 |
An alternative would be to do what I did with the Windows laptop I |
| 41 |
bought - just take out the factory Windows hard drive and put it on a |
| 42 |
bookshelf somewhere. Put in another hard drive and install Linux on |
| 43 |
it. If you ever need to bring it back to "Factory" you can just take |
| 44 |
it out and put the original hard drive back in the machine again. If |
| 45 |
you intend on actually using Windows, or do not have/cannot afford a |
| 46 |
second hard drive, then this is obviously not a realistic solution. |
Archives