Davie
1000+ Head-Fier
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- Jul 8, 2002
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OK, I know it's officially "Mandriva," but that's just such a lame name... Also I know there must be specialized Mandrake forums, but I've always gotten good advice here in the past about technical matters, so I thought I'd give it a shot.
I've been wanting to try out Linux for awhile and as I only have one available computer w/o a lot of extra HD capacity, I thought I'd try installing Linux on an external USB hard drive and boot from there. First tried Fedora, but the installer couldn't even find the USB drive. Then tried Mandrake. Just to check things out, I booted from the live CD version (Move) first. It found the external drive and was even able to read and write from it, no problem. So I rebooted to the Mandrake 10.1 installer, clicked through the first few screens, then got to the disk partition page. After selecting the USB drive I clicked OK. After about 15 seconds I got an error message (sorry, I don't remember it verbatim but it said something about "I don't know how to partition vfat").
Here's the bad part. When I rebooted into Windows the USB drive was no longer recognized. I then rebooted using the Mandrake live CD, same story. Finally, I tried plugging in a different USB drive under Windows and it was recognized as normal.
So obviously Mandrake trashed my original USB drive during the failed partition. This is not a tragedy since Staples said I could return it within 14 days if I had any problems. However, it does leave me wondering what exactly went wrong and if there's a way foward with my little Linux project. Is the idea of booting from an external USB drive fundamentally flawed for some reason (though it would seem not since Mandriva actually sells a bootable USB hard drive package, or used to, since it is not listed as out of stock)? If not and I try again, then how can I avoid wrecking another disc? Is it better to do this using an IDE drive and if so am I going to have to buy a whole new computer? And is it possible to buy a home PC w/ Linux preinstalled, since installing operating systems is something I'd rather not deal with anyway?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
I've been wanting to try out Linux for awhile and as I only have one available computer w/o a lot of extra HD capacity, I thought I'd try installing Linux on an external USB hard drive and boot from there. First tried Fedora, but the installer couldn't even find the USB drive. Then tried Mandrake. Just to check things out, I booted from the live CD version (Move) first. It found the external drive and was even able to read and write from it, no problem. So I rebooted to the Mandrake 10.1 installer, clicked through the first few screens, then got to the disk partition page. After selecting the USB drive I clicked OK. After about 15 seconds I got an error message (sorry, I don't remember it verbatim but it said something about "I don't know how to partition vfat").
Here's the bad part. When I rebooted into Windows the USB drive was no longer recognized. I then rebooted using the Mandrake live CD, same story. Finally, I tried plugging in a different USB drive under Windows and it was recognized as normal.
So obviously Mandrake trashed my original USB drive during the failed partition. This is not a tragedy since Staples said I could return it within 14 days if I had any problems. However, it does leave me wondering what exactly went wrong and if there's a way foward with my little Linux project. Is the idea of booting from an external USB drive fundamentally flawed for some reason (though it would seem not since Mandriva actually sells a bootable USB hard drive package, or used to, since it is not listed as out of stock)? If not and I try again, then how can I avoid wrecking another disc? Is it better to do this using an IDE drive and if so am I going to have to buy a whole new computer? And is it possible to buy a home PC w/ Linux preinstalled, since installing operating systems is something I'd rather not deal with anyway?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
