Booting from an external HD?

Okay, I searched already, and couldn't find the answer here.

I installed Ubuntu Linux on a USB Maxtor External drive successfully. The only problem is, when I went to reboot, I held down the option key to choose which drive to boot from, and my external wasn't mounted! What could I do?

I was thinking of also possibly using the system preferences pane and selecting the external under "startup disk".

Any other suggestions?

Correct me if I am wrong but I believe in order to boot from an external drive you have to have a firewire external drive.

I don't think Ubuntu can be installed on a external drive. At least when I was working with it last year (It was Hoary Hedgehog at the time so it may have changed) it had to be installed on the system drive because when you booted up it would load up its own boot menu off of a small partition it created.

Also what machine are you trying to install this on?

Yeah I think it needs to be firewire in order to boot. Easy way to check is to go to the system prefs and see if its listed as a bootable drive. If not, get a firewire version.

Aww crap you guys are right.

anyway, Ubuntu doesn't have firewire support, so that's out. Oh well...

yegs said:

Correct me if I am wrong but I believe in order to boot from an external drive you have to have a firewire external drive.

Click to expand...

Is this only for Ubuntu Linux? I was able to boot OS X off of a USB external drive.

Ubuntu doesnt support FireWire. You can boot off of an external firewire or usb with OS X