External Linux Boot Disk - how-to?

Discussion in 'Storage' started by gluefish, Nov 30, 2008.

  1. gluefish

    gluefish

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    I just bought an AAO with a 160gb HDD, and Win XP Home.
    I'd like to attach an external USB / FW 160gb HDD from Iomega (2.5" SATA inside), to the box and use it as an alternate OS with Mandriva or Ubuntu.

    1. Which of the two linii are better for this box? (OK I recognize this might be a religious question)
    2. What would be a good step-by-step way to do this? I have:
    a. No external CD/DVD.
    b. A 2gB SD.
    c. A USB SD adapter ( for booting off of, I understand the AAO won't boot off of the SD slot )
    d. An iso of each of the linii on a separate desktop machine. Still haven't decided on which one I want, until I get some feedback.

    I'm thinking:
    Move the iso to the SD.
    Boot off the SD.
    Install Linux to the external HDD.
    Boot off the external HDD.

    Anyone see any land mines in this path?
     
    gluefish, Nov 30, 2008
    #1
  2. gluefish

    RockDoctor

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    Should work. Distro question is definitely a religious one - I've got both Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 8.10 on my AA1's 120GB HDD, and am happy with both. Neither required extensive tweaking, and the functionality appears to be identical. Mandriva would probably be similar
     
    RockDoctor, Nov 30, 2008
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  3. gluefish

    gluefish

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    OK, now, what's a good tool to use to move the ISO to a bootable USB Key?
     
    gluefish, Dec 1, 2008
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  4. gluefish

    RockDoctor

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    Each distro seems to have its own. Google is your friend
     
    RockDoctor, Dec 1, 2008
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  5. gluefish

    gluefish

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    Well now, everything went well.
    Except the install.
    Seems it went onto the internal hard disk instead of the external one.
    Now I'm committed to an Acer Aspire One Ubuntu computer!

    The good news is, I like it.
     
    gluefish, Dec 3, 2008
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  6. gluefish

    RockDoctor

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    So you installed on sda instead of sdb? Nothing wrong with running Ubuntu off your AA1's HDD. Many of us do. Just curious - did you preserve the WInXP installl and recovery partitions?
     
    RockDoctor, Dec 4, 2008
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  7. gluefish

    gluefish

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    No. Clobbered that, too.

    And after 2 weeks trying to get ubuntu drivers working correctly with the wifi, sound (mic), and webcam, I gave up. I *like* ubuntu, but I think I'm going to wait for the next version to try again.

    Meantime, I installed XP Pro along with the AAO drivers I found on Acer's website. Beautiful. Everything works as before. 'Cept, I put Office 2003 on instead of Sun OpenOffice.
     
    gluefish, Dec 24, 2008
    #7
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