Installing onto a USB External Hard Drive

[tazz72]

Hello,
I've got a Gateway 4000 series laptop - 1.3 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB hard drive in the PC, CDRW/DVD drive. I recently purchased a 160 GB external hard drive to install Linux on to learn. I have no real knowledge of how to do more than mount drive in Linux right now (hence the learning part). I verified that my bios supports booting from removeable devices, but whenever I try to install Linux it only reads my laptop's hard drive. I don't know how to make it see my external hard drive. I've read several help files the past week, a lot of them talk about going into expert mode. I've tried typing install expert at the boot: prompt when I first get into FC4, but I still can't get it to see my external drive.

Can someone help the lost newbie?

Thanks!!

[mark2219]

I think you should check whether your external USB controller support the booting function. There are many external USB controller that don't support the USB booting function for my experiences. You can view my post title -- Sharing USB booting to find some suggestions

[james419]

Some systems have trouble seeing an non linux formated USB drive during installation. Before installing FC3 and 4 on my system I found it necessary to format my USB drive with a livecd linux distro. I used Mepis. After formating the drive Fedora had no problem seeing the drive. I booted using the linux expert boot command then when the installation selection came up I specified install on existing partitions and Fedora offered both my internal drive and the USB drive as install options. I just had to pick the partitions on the external drive I wished to use. As I have four external drives and one is very large I now use Partition Magic in Windows to make my partitions now. I had trouble with the livecd making more than four partitions and one of my drive has 15.

Have fun

Jim