[Novalug] How to partition and load CentOS and XP on a USB external hard disk?

[Michael Hughes]

Hi Jim,

You need to be sure your motherboard can support booting off an
external USB drive - I believe most modern (~2 year old) MBs can.

I've never booted Windows from a USB device, but I imagine that it
would expect to be the first partition on the drive - just like it
does for IDE devices.  If that is the case, then I would suggest that
you get familiar with restoring your bootloader in the event that
Windows or Linux (yes, Linux!) accidentally corrupts it.

This happened to me more times than I can remember.  My final solution
has been to install Windows on Master of IDE 0, then change jumpers to
place it elsewhere.  Then I use:
   map (hd0) (hd1)
   map (hd1) (hd0)
to trick Windows into thinking it's sitting on the first drive (hd0.)

Since you'll probably have Windows as the first partition, the most
common repair tool will be 'fixboot' or 'fixmbr' from the Windows
installation disk.  After that repair runs, you will likely need to
edit your C:\boot.ini file to make it Linux-aware again.

Let us know what you find out!
-Mike



On 1/14/07, James (Jim) Darlack <jmdarlack at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Ok, now that I have my USB external hard disk drives working, I want to
> setup the 40 gig for Linux, XP, and a swap partition.
>
> I discovered qtparted on CentOS, and mamaged to create a hard disk with one
> contiguous partition, and another hard disk with a a fat32, linux swap, and
> ntfs partition.  Then managed to read the fat32.... and I think the ntfs
> partition.
>
> What do you linux vets recomend I do to setup the 40 or 60 gig hard drive so
> that I can load XP and CentOS and a swap partition on it?
>
> The goal, is to set my bios boot from the external USB drive in XP or Linux.
>
> Any advice is appreciated.
>
> Jim
>
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