Another Ubuntu on external drive question

[Derek Broughton]

Thilo Six wrote:

> Derek Broughton wrote the following on 30.12.2007 16:09
> 
> </snip>
> 
>> I suppose I should have clarified in the original post that _because_ the
>> USB drive is being ignored in the actual BIOS process, I'm trying to get
>> to it from the Grub on the internal drive.
> 
> ic
> i am not familiar with that part of grub and therefore can´t help there.
 
Well, I may perhaps not have had grub quite correctly installed.  After
following Peter's instructions (particularly "run around in circles, bash
head on keyboard, tear your hair etc. etc." - thankfully, I have a lot of
hair), I completely disabled booting from the internal drive on one of the
laptops, and then it _did_ boot off the USB drive.  After re-enabling the
internal drive, it still boots off the USB _most of the time_.

I rather suspect though, that the real problem is the quality of the drive. 
As I said, I put an ext3 fs on it, and it can't operate for more than a few
minutes before a journal write fails, and the fs gets remounted read-only. 
Not much use if it's going to do that...

I wouldn't go to this sort of trouble, usually, but my father-in-law wants
to play with Linux, and I don't dare do anything that affects my
mother-in-law's computer, so I said "why don't I just install a Linux
system on a USB drive for you...".  Well, one of my clients wanted to do
this too - he's got a decent USB drive and a corporate laptop that he can't
install Linux on, so maybe I'll offer to set it up for him and if that
works get a better drive for FIL.
-- 
derek