Ubuntu Installation :: Boot Partition On USB Drive?
Aug 1, 2010
I have been looking around and cant really find a guide on how to do this, I have found guides on how-to put a live CD on a usb flash drive, but this isnt want i want to doI want to use a high-end USB flash drive as a sort of SSD to put my boot partition on, I think if i do this it will decrease my boot time significantly. If it works i am going to take the back case off of my laptop and install the guts of the flash drive inside my laptop, i think the mod would be cool, i just dont know how to do it on the software side
then I used dd to transfer data from the old drive to the new drive. Now I am unable to boot into the new drive. I tried to boot again from the live-CD but fdisk reports that the drive has no partition table. I can still mount the devices (e.g. mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3) and I can see all the files. But without a partition table, I can't set one partition to be bootable. Why doesn't gparted create a partition table? it created the filesystems just fine. how do I boot into the new disk? What do I have to do to make grub handle the new disk?
We had a drive failure on /dev/sda. Everything 'except' boot was on raid5 across sda, sdb, sdc, sdd. I know how to repartition a new drive and rebuild the raid etc, but I don't know how to regenerate the files that reside on the boot partition. I really don't want to re-install as we have lot of custom code and software that may depend on our current libraries and build environment.
I'd like the final layout to have a Windows partition (will start out as XP and will become Win7 when I can afford yet another copy), a partition for Ubuntu, and a shared Data partition that I can use for all my files between both OSs. I think this should be fairly straight forward with Linux on a Primary partition with / and swap. Only thing is, from what I've read (and yes I know this is a bit old school) it might be a good idea to put in a /Home partition so that I can reinstall new upgrades and maintain settings. But I don't want to max out my 4 primary partitions so I can use a 4th partition as a kind of sandbox for OS testing without using VirtualBox all the time.
This leaves me in need of some advice, I've never used Fdisk and I was planning on just using the Ubuntu installer to do all of this, but I don't know if I can create /Home as a logical partition in the main Ubuntu partition and still have the benefit of being able to reformat /root without losing /Home. I might have just confused myself, because no matter how many guides and How Tos I read I still don't really get extended partitions, I understand logical vs. primary but extended is...confusing. I need the Ubuntu partition to be bootable, so it needs to be a primary partition...I think. Unless I can have: /boot, /, swap, and /Home...
Also, if Ubuntu can read NTFS, and Win7 can read Ext3, what should a do with /Data? Or should I just go with FAT32 and be done with it. (It's a big HDD btw, 640 GB, so /Data will be fairly large)
install fedora 11 on Vista I want to keep the windows boot loader and also install on a usb drive or a seperate partition that has 10GB free "install doesn't see partition's". Recently I installed ubuntu and had a major problem with booting, without having the usb drive connected I couldn't boot windows so uninstalled it. I'm trying to install now but install does'nt give me any option to select partitions from my drives one 320GB "portable, 3 partitions" and 80GB "main os 2 partitions one partition has 10GB free"
I am building a 10.04.1LTS server. I am putting the /root filesystem into a Software RAID1 partition. I want to keeo my /boot partition outside of RAID.Is there a way to have a boot partition on both sda and sdb so if one drive fails the second boot partition will work away - or should this be kept in with RAID also.
using onboard windows disk management i have made 75gb unallocated to add to the aforementioned ntfs data partition. but, after resizing extended partition, will i need to fix grub even though i will be adding the unallocated space to a storage partition and not the ubuntu boot partition?
I have a brand new thinkpad X301 with 4GB of RAM and thinking of getting fedora 11 on it. The plan is to have it triple boot with vista/seven and hopefully OSx86. I am aware of the 4 primary partitions limit on an MBR disk. I was thinking of having a swap file instead of swap partition and not creating a boot partition as well. If I install the boot loader(GRUB?) on the root partition will I be able to boot it without any problems by using vista's boot loader?
Or Maybe I should install GRUB on the MBR and add all the other operating systems on it? Does anyone have any objections for not creating a swap partition or a boot partition? When comes to desktop environment I've been using KDE in the past, is there any major advantage of using Gnome over it? KDE seems to look really nice on fedora where Gnome is maybe more stable?
Old drive is dying, so I copied the system over to my new drive. I've moved /home and /tmp to separate partitions and updated fstab and grub with the appropriate UUIDs from blkid. Grub wasn't loading but that's been fixed now.
Problem:
The problem now is that when I boot I get the following screen:
Errors were found while checking the disk drive for /
Press F to attempt to fix the errors, I to ignore, S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery
F doesn't work, and in manual recovery the file system is read-only. How to proceed?
I have a weird problem with an sata partition. This drive is onle volume of an md raid set, and has one partition filling the whole drive. of type "fd" ( linux raid autodetect). When my machine boots, the drive containing this partition is present as /dev/sdc. However, the partition is not - there is no /dev/sdc1. If I look at the partition table in fdisk, all appears to be fine. If I do anything that causes the partition table to be rescanned (such as writing in fdisk, or running partprobe, ... ), the partition shows up fine at that point and all data is present and when I assemble the RAID using it, its in sync. This drive is attached to the same (motherboard) controller as my other drives which have their partitions recognized just fine.
iMac (no internal drive/dead) --------- (Firewire) ------- [[MAC OS X]] | | |[code]...
I routinely use the firewire drive to boot MAC OS X.However, I would like to boot from the linux partition of the USB drive. This linux partition had linux installed on it from a live cd, and during that process, I told the installer to install GRUB on the usb drive (which happened to be /dev/sdd).My question is, how do I get this disk to show up during the iMac option-boot? Currently, only the firewire MAC OS X option shows up. I have read about rEFIT, but that appears to install it to the Mac OS X disk (would that still work?)...Also mentioned was installing rEFIT to the internal EFI system partition, but I don't know if that is wise.
Back in Febuary, my wife bought a Toshiba Satilite from Wal-Mart and a few days ago the hard drive got toasted. So now I'm using an 8gig usb drive as the boot drive. I also have 2 other flash drives for downloads and such but overall I am very pleased.
I'm running 11.04 32 bit and was wandering if 64 bit made a difference. I've got 4 gigs of ddr3. It's slow to boot, but once it's running, it's faster then Windows 7. Very nice.
Is there anything I should chage, use, since I'm running it off a flash drive??
I have 3 seperat drives, 2 x 16 gigs and an 8 gig, and was wandering which one would be best for booting off of? What do I look for??
Here's what I got:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] RS880 Host Bridge 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Toshiba America Info Systems Device 9602 00:06.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] RS780 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 2)
I downloaded the Fedora live dvd iso file, burned it to a dvd. I was wondering if I forgot to do something or did I do something wrong. When I try to install from the dvd I get this error message, isoLinux: Disk error 80 , AX = 42A7 , drive 9F Boot Failed: press key to retry When I press a key to retry I get the same error. I also tried to install virtual pc and get not boot disk found.
i made a 10gb partition last time i had linux installed on my netbook. im trying to install ubuntu nbr on that partition when i try to select the 10gb partition(comes up as free space) it says "No root file system is defined please correct this from the partitioning menu" ? I dont get it last time i installed it i had the option to resise my windows partition thats how i made it.
I have created startup disk on my external USB HDD (on /dev/sdb1), I have been using it for some time, installed lots of software etc.Now I would like to install it properly onto the same HDD. I have partitioned the rest of the drive (formatted /dev/sdb2 as ext4 for it), but when I try to install, the installer complains about needing to unmount /dev/cdrom (which is in fact a loopback image on /dev/sdb1), although I don't want to touch that partition (even unchecked grub option).
So, couple of questions:
1) How to install it onto the same USB HDD, different partition? 2) (optional) How to preserve everything I have installed?
Code: $ mount aufs on / type aufs (rw) none on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) none on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) none on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
finally got mostly everything fixed on my opensuse 11.3. 11.3 is my only os on my laptop right now and I want to be able to dual boot with backtrack4. I used to have bt3 but it was on a usb loading up with winxp. Anyway, I've downloaded the iso image and after hours of forum reading I figured out how to mount the iso image. Doing so allows me just to look at the files. Is there an install file somewhere I'm missing?
Also, couldn't ever figure out how to partition my drive to make room for bt4. Tried downloading gparted and failed. Tried using the expert partitioner program that came with this system but it won't allow me to create another partition. Couldn't ever find a reason why. Will bt4 allow me to create a partition upon installation? How do I install?
I'm running 9.10 off of a 4 GiB CF card. I keep running into space issues with updates, so I purchased an 8 GiB replacement card. I've cloned the 4 GiB card to a .IMG file using DD.I've then copied the 4 GiB image back to the 8 GiB card using the Ubuntu startup disk creator program. Once done, I'm able to properly boot off of the new 8 GiB clone.Unfortunately, the clone ends up with 3.67 GiB of unallocated space at the end *see attached). I tried deleting the "extended" partition that the swap is located at after booting from a Live CD and the system was unable to boot after this. I was thinking that I would delete the swap entirely and create a swap file after I merged the existing partitions, but I was unable to do this.
best way to do this (e.g. get one large 8 GiB partition with my old image on it)? I still have the original untouched 4 GiB card and also have an external CF drive if I need to redo the cloning. I've also used Clonezilla before, so perhaps there's a way to do this that allow me to grow the image as it's being cloned.
My laptop can't boot from cdrom becouse it is broken and it can't boot from USB becouse it has never been able. Ubuntu 8.10 now run in my laptop withgrub 1.I've just try the following trick.1) I put grub4dos in /boot2) I put iso image in /boot3) I add the follwing entrt in source.list
Code: # =========== GRUB4GOS =================================== title == Use grub4dos for the following entries: ==
Added an SSD (dev/sdc) and decided to move some less often changed directories there. Started with /usr and /boot, leaving / on a primary in the first drive, for now. All started ok, and my changed fstab mounted the right ones, and the system works.
However, grub is actually using the original /boot on / on sda1. I cannot see any way to change this. (Which makes it sorta hard to update the kernel
From grub:
Okay, since it has two choices, I tried to tell it which one to use. But, grub> root (hd2,5) does nothing.
Disk /dev/sda:
what I seem to recall, grub doesn't care about the boot flag on the disk. Nor does it care about primary vs. logical (except GNU doc says "makeactive" only works on a primary?).
The GNU doc also indicates that it looks for a directory /boot on the partition, so if you're mounting a partition as /boot, it also needs to contain a /boot directory under it. Tried that, but no change.
Is my problem the logical partition? Does that prevent "grub> root" from changing it? I'm afraid to wipe out the old /boot and find that I can't start up.
After installing karmic with Grub2 I am unable to boot into Archlinux partition. Grub2 has removed the last line of the Archlinux boot stanza! It used to read:-
[Code]....
Following the Grub2 tutorials I have tried editing /etc/grub.d/40_custom as follows:-
[Code]....
But no luck. Only way into Archlinux is to get into the edit shell and manually add the missing line and remove other stuff not needed. I have spent hours trying to resolve this issue and I am fairly p----d off
I have a new 1.5tb internal drive I want to partition as NTFS (because Windoze machines need to see/use it) and in gparted, when I go to partition -> new, it says it could not add this operation to the list a partition cannot have a length of -1 sectors. I recall having this issue on my 2tb external drive and I ended up creating the NTFS parition on a Windoze machine and then bringing it to the Linux box but since this is an internal drive, that's not an option. I took all the defaults in the "Create new partition" screen.
i have a laptop with windows 7 and its 64 bit and its got 1 had drive which is 300gb and i got 250gb of free space so when i try to partion it i partion my drive. i right click my hard drive which has 280gb free space and click on shrink and then selcte 20gb then go to unaclocated space and then click new voloume then i click next a couple of times and then i get this eppro.
I've got a problem I've been trying to work out for a while. I have a 160gb drive, and only 15gb dedicated to Ubuntu's installation because of a screwup. I have very little resources at my disposal, as I'm using a netbook with no optical drive, and I can't seem to get the liveusb to work. It just stalls after the menu with an error message. I have no way to connect my machine to the internet, and I've been forced to transfer files from a friend's computer. I'm running out of ideas, but one I thought of was to copy the install partition over to the larger partition. I'm not sure if it's possible, or if it would make a larger install or just a copy of the same size. I just want some clarification on how I would solve this issue, even if my idea doesn't work.
I got Lucid Lynx and i want to partition the drive into two harddrives when i install, like with windows i would have my harddrive made into C and D and i would have windows on the C and all my movies and stuff on D. I saw some things about making the rest of your space to store files in the /home files but i when i log into ubuntu after installing it shows the /home folder inside the disk. I dont know if it makes sense but, i was wondering if u can have it the way windows does it so it looks like two harddives and which options to select when i'm paraitioning. i really want to change over to ubuntu i just wanna work this out first cause i dont know so much yet haha.
I use Windows 7: Home Premium and I have three partitions on my hard disk. Lately I installed Ubuntu NOT on C: (win 7) BUT on D: (size 104 GB). Now, I CAN'T find the drive (D:) on Ubuntu. However I can still find it on Win 7.
I have mint installed on my 80gb drive and want to install another distro alongside it! So far none of the distros I have tried have been able to do this themselves.How can I partition the drive for another distro? I have gparted installed and on cd.Please walk me thru the steps,
I have recently ghosted, using g4u, an 80 gig drive to a 30 gig drive. The data size is about 15 gig so no problem there.The system does work and it doing everything it should, except for some errors in dmsg log.The thing is though, that the system works! all the services are running and live.And i have years worth of customizations in this machine. Has been running for several years, so i dont just want to reformat and reinstall. Its hard to get linux the way you want it sometimes!So my question is this, is there a way to fix my partition or somehow tell the machine what the current boundries <i>should</i> be?
I want to install Ubuntu (10.10) on the 1TB drive I need to unplug the SSD while installing it in order to dual boot by pressing F8 (the way I want it to be) so that Grub doesn't get installed on the SSD. What I want to know is can I partition the 1TB drive to install Ubuntu without any data corruption or anything? I have read that NTFS can lose data if partitioned with data already on it (I have no way of backing up my 100GB of files on the drive, as currently this IS my backup drive). What I want to do is have 900GB for files, and a 100GB partition (or partitions adding up to 100GB) for Ubuntu- what is the best way to do this? I don't need seperate partitions for ubuntu, can I install the whole thing to the 100GB partition and boot from it? Or do I need swap as well? I was thinking of making 900GB partition, 4GB partition for swap (if needed) and 96GB partition for Ubuntu (/ if I understand) as this is what the "erase entire drive" option creates.
