On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 4:49 PM, Michael Sullivan<[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 16:38 -0500, Paul Hartman wrote: >> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 4:30 PM, Michael Sullivan<[email protected]> >> wrote: >> > My server box died last week, and, as it was about ten years old, I >> > decided to replace it. My wife and I opened the case and removed the >> > hard drive (A major undertaking for us, I might add). We hooked the old >> > hard drive up to a hard drive enclosure and plugged it via USB into a >> > new computer we bought this morning. This new computer runs Windows >> > Vista and only Windows Vista. I want to run Gentoo Linux on the >> > enclosure. I have to keep Windows on it because all the computer repair >> > shoppes around here only know Windows, and will be confused if I take it >> > in to be repaired and it isn't running Windows. I planned to install >> > grub on the main internal hard drive and use that to boot to the USB >> > drive. I checked the BIOS, and there's no option to boot to USB. I've >> > spent a couple of hours today googling this question, but all I can seem >> > to find is how to do this from a linux partition other than the one on >> > the USB drive. Is this even possible, and if so, how would I do it? >> >> It seems surprising that such a new computer wouldn't let you boot >> from USB. Usually in the boot order section of BIOS one of those >> choices will be "removable disk" or "external device" or something >> like that. That will typically boot your USB disk. >> > > Nope. The only things it has are floppy boot (It doesn't even have a > floppy drive!), cd boot, and hdd boot...
I have also seen one computer where the external USB hard drive actually showed up in the "Hard drives" section along with the normal internal drives, in case you didn't look there already. Anyway, I am sure you can install GRUB to hard drive and have it boot from the USB disk without any problems -- as long as the USB disk can be seen by grub. I am not sure how the Vista boot loader and GRUB interact (or interfere) with each other. I think there is a way to calling grub from the Windows Vista boot loader so as to leave the Windows pieces of the boot process in-tact. I haven't done that myself so I can't give specific help, sorry. An alternative would be to do what I did with the Windows laptop I bought - just take out the factory Windows hard drive and put it on a bookshelf somewhere. Put in another hard drive and install Linux on it. If you ever need to bring it back to "Factory" you can just take it out and put the original hard drive back in the machine again. If you intend on actually using Windows, or do not have/cannot afford a second hard drive, then this is obviously not a realistic solution.
