Ubuntu on a portable HDD

Hi All,

I have a new laptop and I'd like to run linux but I'd rather not start wiping the drive straight away. I had another idea though.

Since my laptop can boot from an external USB device, is it possible to install Ubuntu straight onto a USB Portable HDD?

If this is possible then it means to run Ubuntu I simply plug-in the drive and boot, otherwise unplug the drive and boot to run Vista.

Vola.

What yeah reckon?

Cheers

 

yea im interested in this too. does somebody know the answer?

also, how do you tell if your laptop is bootable from the usb? is there something you have to do to your laptop to be able to do this? im not sure if my laptop can handle it (hp dv6500t).

 

I've never done this, but I see no reason why it shouldn't work. Of course you would have to set the boot order to USB first then Hard disk second. It should work fine, but I've never done it before so I would have others confirm this before you install linux. Or you could just go install it and tell us if it works

Make 100% sure you tell the installation to go to the external and not wipe your internal drive.

You don't necessarily have to nuke the entire hard drive. Depending on how much free space you have available, you could set up a normal dual boot. It's pretty easy to do you just need the available space. It would make your life much easier if you could do a normal dual boot since you wouldn't have to mess with an external drive.

Good luck and have fun,

Robert

[edit]

@littleasian:

Almost all computers made in the past few years should be able to boot from USB. To tell if yours is one of them just go into the BIOS settings (press a certain key when the computer first starts. Usually it's delete or F2 I believe) and search for the boot order. If you can boot from USB it should be in there with HDD, CD, floppy, etc. Just be careful when changing BIOS settings.

 

I also am interested in trying out Ubuntu but don't want to kill of my XP just yet.
I was asking some of the pro's and they said yes, if your system can boot from USB and if you have USB 2.0 it should work just fine, i have also heard of people using a flash drive. The only draw back is that by doing it this way you could be introducing a bottle neck.

Another way would be to set up a dual boot if you have the disk space

I didn't have either enough disk space or the capability to boot from USB.

so I'm building up the courage to format my hard drive and just go for it

Good luck

 

But yeah theoretically it should work as long as you put the bootorder to start with that HDD. But anyways you can try this... http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=puppy That linux distro is able to boot from an USB drive, its a very small full featured linux. Try it out.

 

This is definately sounding like an option. I think I'll look into it some more.

I can't see any reason for it not to work. Sure, the USB will present a bit of a bottle neck but for the time being linux is not my main OS. The plan is to learn it, get used to it, then one day make the change. Being a software engineer, most of my development work will always be under the MS OS umbrella. But it will be nice to have a new OS to work on.