On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 17:11 -0500, Paul Hartman wrote: > On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 4:49 PM, Michael Sullivan<msulli1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 16:38 -0500, Paul Hartman wrote: > >> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 4:30 PM, Michael Sullivan<msulli1...@gmail.com> > >> 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. >
We can't take the hard drive out and put a different one in. I strongly implied that my wife and I are clumsy. We don't have the fine motor skills needed to put a hard drive into a computer. She barely had enough skill to get that one out.
