Fedora 16 Install to Portable Drive Unsuccesful

[jrw1234]

Hi,

I am a novice. Please help me if you can.

I am having a horrific time booting Fedora 16 after installing onto a 500 GB Iomega Prestige Portable USB Drive. I am using an Acer Extensa 5230E laptop computer with 2GB RAM and 160 GB HD.

The main approach I am using is to boot the Fedora 16 Live iso image from a CD I burned, then use the write to disk facility to write to the Iomega USB disk. What ends up happening is it fails to write the bootloader but the the rest of the installation completes (yes I have looked at the F16 common bugs ). When I reboot the laptop, it goes right to Windows and does not boot F16. I have changed the order of the device booting in the BIOS so it checks USB first before the hard drive which has Windows.

I have tried many, many things over the course of several days, including partitioning the disk with a 1MB partition before the main Linux partition. I've tried dd, unetbootin, various partioning approaches, but nothing has worked. I have wiped out a USB stick which had Fedora 14 on it by mistake so my frustration is very, very high.

I don't understand why the Live installation doesn't work properly. Can someone help me?

//JRW1234

[txell]

Hi JR1234
I don't know whether you resolved the question and/or you are still after it. By the way you are lucky, 500Gb HD sounds great for fedora 16. I got it working Ok on a 32Gb usb pen driver. I didn't have that problem you report. (My problem were others, lol. e.g. make partitions in the pendriver and use only part of it, etc). So, going to the point:
1.First thing I did: using a partition manager convert the whole HD to ext4 filesystem.
2. Then, following carefully (e.g) this screenshoot guide. Read it before anything as your choice to each option could be different. For instance:
3.In 2.9 I opted for: "Use all the space" (I tryed with those other options, but unsuccessfully)
4.Here Carefullly. Select the HD target (your iomega 500gb).
5. Then, as shown in 2.12 select the "Change device" and select the HD (your Iomega 500Gb) where will go the boatloader.
And that's it!. Then I updated fedora, some post-install adds as shown here: http://www.my-guides.net/en/guides/l...allation-guide
And that's it.
Hope you find this of help.
Txe.

[jrw1234]

txell,

Thanks for the reply.

I did finally get it to install. Turns out the disk itself was unusable because of some unerasble sectors..

Retried with another disk and it work fine.

Again thans for your info

//JRW1234