Note: Since the internal hard drive is disabled the Linux OS will have no choice, it will install all of the required components for the external USB drive to become a bootable device. The only device that should appear is the external USB drive.Install Linux OS (Follow your normal install procedure).Push the appropriate key (F12 for Dell Laptops) to bring up the “One Time Boot Menu”.The computer will reboot so you can see the Post Screen.There are several ways to achieve the results described herein I will describe two of these methods and you can choose which method works better for your scenario. While this solution may not be right for everyone this will provide you with more options. Carry multiple working OS’s with you in the fieldĪll of the above and more without risking the OS installed in your laptop or desktop.These drives come in various sizes with the most common and cost effective today being 250GB. Small foot print USB powered external drives are very obtainable and affordable. You will want to use laptop or desktop hardware in which the BIOS supports booting to a USB device. This document applies to SLES 10 SP1, SLED 10 SP1, OpenSUSE 10.3 however based on my testing I feel that this will work with any Linux distribution. Based on the testing I have done in an effort to achieve the desired results, I did not want a dual-boot on either the laptops operating system (internal hard drive) or on the external USB drive. Should Grub install its files to the external drive, the drive must be connected before booting the computer or you will receive a Grub 17or 21 error. While the dual-boot scenario works, this can cause undesirable issues when grub installs its files on the external drive. This article was written with the goal of defining an alternative to the traditional dual boot concept and keeping each operating system isolated from each other. While I did not specifically test a USB Thumb Drive and did not intend to address this device in this article, I see no reason why this would not work for Thumb Drives as well. A simple Google search shows many articles, blogs and forum posts written on this topic, all of them discuss setting up dual-boot strategies. The topic of a bootable external USB Linux hard drive (without dual-boot) is an area that is not well documented.

How to make a usb drive bootable on pc