Using 120gb USB Drive to Boot Linux

[Rick Stevens]

Harold Hallikainen wrote:
> I've read that many Intel motherboards will boot from USB. Some day I want
> to build a USB raid array!

Many motherboards will boot from USB (Intel, ASUS, Gigabyte).

IMHO a USB RAID is a silly idea.  The performance will be awful, and I
sure wouldn't want to trust my active data to anything that can easily
be unplugged.  It might be an interesting intellectual experiment but
singularly useless for real applications.

>>I bought a 120 gb USB hard drive. I plugged it in and was pleasantly
>>suprised than RH 9 saw the drive (looked at dmesg) and I could easily
>>mount it.
>>
>>I would like to install Red Hat 9 or Fedora Core 2 but neither seem to
>>see the USB drive to allow Linux to be installed on it. I see that the
>>install process loads a driver for the USB drive but that's about it.

When it comes time to partition the hard drive, does disk druid list
the USB drive?  It'll show up as a SCSI drive (/dev/sda most likely).

>>I would love to be able to boot directly from the USB drive or at least
>>use a floppy boot disk to start Linux from the USB drive. My new laptop
>>(Dec, 2003, Toshiba Satellite) doesn't seem to allow booting from a USB
>>drive. (In the bios, I only see PC Card and HDD as choices.)

You may have to enable "legacy USB" for it to work and you probably must
have the USB drive plugged in at power-up for it to be recognized.

Most laptops that have pluggable CD or floppy drives do support USB as a
boot medium, but not all.  You may have one of the few that don't.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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