Re: [gentoo-user] Booting an exernal usb drive from grub

[Michael Sullivan]

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

We can't take the hard drive out and put a different one in.  I strongly
implied that my wife and I are clumsy.  We don't have the fine motor
skills needed to put a hard drive into a computer.  She barely had
enough skill to get that one out.