On Sat, 2007-11-24 at 23:37 -0600, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: > Rick Bilonick wrote: > > Is it possible to install Fedora 8 on a hard drive (120 gb) attached to > > a laptop via USB, and then boot from it without damaging the distro > > installed on the laptop's internal hard drive? The laptop is about 2 > > years old (Dell Inspiron 2200) that I believe can boot from an external > > hard drive or a USB flash drive. > > > > I would like to test out F8 with the laptop's wireless card and I'm > > debating whether to use a USB hard drive that I have or buying an 8 gb > > USB flash drive. (If someone could point me to how to set up a usb flash > > drive to boot F8, I would appreciate it.) > > > > Rick B. > > > As long as your BIOS will boot from a USB drive, it is not a > problem. I would suggest you try the live CD to see if F8 is going > to work for you before doing a USB install. > > I have not tested it with F8, but F7 installed just fine to a USB > hard drive using the expert install. You have to tweak the Grub > configuration after the install because the BIOS mapping of the USB > drive changes between the install and when you you boot from the > drive. If you are using LVM, you also have to make sure you are > using different volume groups on each drive. If you are using > labels, you have to make sure the labels on the USB drive are > different then the ones on the built-in drives. If you are using are > not using LVM or labels, you have to change the /etc/fstab entries > to use /dev/sda for the USB drive. At least when I did it, the > initrd only had the USB drivers, so the USB drive was the first SCSI > drive, while during install, the internal drive was /dev/sda. > > Mikkel Thanks. I have tried the live CD's/DVD's but I have a bcm4318 network card that can use either ndiswrapper or must have Version 4 firmware in /lib/firmware for the native driver to work. As far as I can tell, this precludes it from working with a live CD or DVD because I can't store the firmware in /lib/firmware. Rick
