How Do You Install Linux On An External Hard Drive?
Q. I’m trying to breath new life into an old PC where windows crashed – I have the old hard drive in an external case and can link it to a laptop – but I’m not 100% sure how to go about getting linux installed on the external hard drive before replacing it into the old PC.
I don’t want to end up with Linux on the laptop.
Any ideas?
Thanks for your help.
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If you install linux on a hard drive while attached to a laptop and then install the hard drive into another pc you could have serious problems trying to get it to run. When you install it on the laptop the installation will be setup up for that monitor, cpu, motherboard, type of memory, etc and then when yo try to boot it in the pc most if not all of those items will be different and will produce multiple errors.
I presume you don’t have a cdrom in the old pc.
I am sure the old pc cannot boot from the usb either. I think your only option would be to beg or borrow a cdrom for the installation process. You could probably buy a cdrom for $20.
Good luck
Try installing Wubi. What it does is this: You install Wubi like any other file. This will install Linux on your hard drive. So basically you can boot from the hard drive with Linux. If you don’t like it or whatever you can just uninstall it.
I am rather confused – you want to install Linux to a HARD DISK, not a computer? This is not possible.
You can burn a bootable CD – I assume that your old PC has a CD drive? You must put a liveCD in there and boot the computer – then install from CD.
Your computer needs to have an internal Hard Drive, I believe, for this to work.
you can download linux as an iso and burn to an external drive you can also burn it to a usb pen drive if you want
Boot off a live linux cd and go from there. And no, you sure don`t want to end up with linux on laptop!
Amos says: I was noseying over John’s shoulder and he sure hates linux after a few bad experiences with his hard disc. However, I use PCLinuxOS 2007 and it has an auto feature for installing to USB devices, such as USB stick or Hard disc. It might be worth checking out.