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Booting from external HD?

post #1 of 10
8/27/04 at 8:02pm
Thread Starter 
Hey gang,

SO, I got my new 7200 RPM drive and put that into my 6809. Took the old 4200 and put it into this new Bytecc Hotdrive 2.5 combo USB/FW enclosure.

Checking in the BIOS, it's set to boot first off removable devices, then CD/DVD then Hard drive.

I would expect that since I have the USB drive hooked in when I boot it would try to boot the original WinXP Home that was on the 4200 stock drive in the USB shell, but it doesn't. Always goes to the internal laptop drive.

Any ideas? Anyone else able to boot off an external drive? I'd really like to be able to put Linux on the external for trying stuff out without messing with the internal 60 GB drive.

--Mike
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post #2 of 10
8/31/04 at 6:53pm
No one has replied to this post so I am going to comment on it.
A while ago I tried to do Linux and dual OS. From what I know you cannot boot from a USB drive. The speed is not fast enough, but besdies that your drive needs to be mounted correctly which happens during start up. For your USB harddrive to be recognized your USB drivers need to be supported in BIOS.
Therefore I think you don't have much options. You might be able to get an external IDE drive and it might work. But good luck with that. If you just want Linux just do dual boot up and grub takes care of it very well.
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post #3 of 10
9/1/04 at 6:59pm
Thread Starter 
The thing is, I want to put Linux on the external drive since I won't need it all the time, just for the occational experimentation. I already have XP Home on a 40 GB partition and XP 64 bit build 1208 on the remaining 20 GB on the 7200 RPM drive.

If I install Linux, with the USB hooked up, GRUB will obviously go on the internal drive, but can it then boot up the OS from the USB/FW drive?

--Mike
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post #4 of 10
9/1/04 at 7:58pm
The USB is plenty fast enough to run an external drive as a boot source. The high speed USB connectors are capable of 480Mb/s (60MB/s). This is faster than the actual transfer speed of the drive anyway. I know you can boot directly from firewire (400Mb/s, 50MB/s) without any drivers, but in order to boot from a high speed USB HD, I think you will probably need some sort of driver installed in a DOS environment.
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post #5 of 10
9/3/04 at 4:09am
Long time ago I tried this. Of course back then there was only USB 1.1
I am sure there are ways but Thunder PC is correct many BIOS do not support all USB drives. So most likey if it doesn't recognize it during boot up then you might be out of luck. I am not sure if you have already purchased the USB drive but in case you can return it or something, it would be a lot cheaper to just get 60 GB IDE harddrive. Also one thing I am not sure about is when you have to drives one needs to be slave. But I am not sure if you can have an OS on a slave drive. Maybe thunder PC knows?
Amir
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post #6 of 10
9/3/04 at 11:39am
Thread Starter 
First off, how the heck do you expect to put 2 HD's into the laptop? There's only 1 bay.

Now, when I hook the drive up using 1394 FW, I can get it to show up in the list of drives to install Windows to, but when I select any of the parititions it won't allow it.

So... How about this...

My main reason for waqnting to do this is so I can put Linux on the external drive. SOOO, is it possible to install Linux to the USB/FW drive, will it put Grub on the internal drive and then allow me to boot Linux off the external, or Windows off the internal ???

--Mike
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post #7 of 10
9/3/04 at 4:19pm
Perhaps you could make a boot CD that had the kernel and needed drivers on it?
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post #8 of 10
9/3/04 at 5:10pm
sorry i thought u were doing this on a desktop.
But you would need to put the GRUB on your C: drive. Because if I remember correctly Grub needs to be installed on a seprate partition before all you operating systems.
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post #9 of 10
9/7/04 at 2:29pm
I have a 6809 and was curious if anyone knows if the 6811 BIOS supports booting from an external hard drive?
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post #10 of 10
9/17/04 at 4:50pm
Any ideas if the 6811 or other BIOS support this?
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